Starring: Adam Sandler, Katie Holmes and Al Pacino
Directed By: Dennis Dugan
Screenplay By: Steve Koren
Story By: Ben Zook
Produced By: Todd Garner, Adam Sandler and Jack Giarraputo
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Rating: PG
Running Time: 91 minutes
Website: jackandjill-movie.com
Budget: $79 million (estimated)
Genre: Comedy
Release Date: November 11, 2011
Jack and Jill is staggeringly bad, a lazy, ugly and pointless assemblage of improvised scenes, computer-generated gags and expository-heavy ADR. It hangs an hour and half on a premise that wouldn’t even make for a good two-minute sketch. Satisfied the nightmarish vision of Adam Sandler playing his own annoying twin sister would be box office gold, the folks at Sandler’s Happy Madison production company decided to call it a day, leaving insignificant details like storyline and jokes to be decided on the fly while shooting.
Sandler sleepwalks through the movie as Jack, a successful advertising person of some kind or another who has an ideal life with wife Katie Holmes and his two children in a big mansion in L.A. His only worries are potentially losing the big Dunkin’ Donuts account and trying to survive his twin sister Jill’s annual Thanksgiving visit. Jill isn’t so much a character as an annoying voice given form. She is sometimes presented as bitter and passive-aggressive, sometimes as emotionally fragile and naïve and still others as a superhumanly strong, flatulent she-monster.
For reasons of plot contrivance, Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino falls in love with Jill at a Lakers game, and spends the rest of the film stalking her and attempting to broker her love in exchange for an appearance in Jack’s Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. Jill refuses his advances, forcing Jack to inevitably dress in drag and seduce Pacino on his own. There is also a lesson learned of some sort. I have now officially spent as much time thinking about the plot of Jack and Jill as anyone involved in its production.
Jack and Jill is so incredibly inept, it barely even qualifies as a movie. It breaks the cardinal rule of a comedy: it isn’t funny. The dialogue is so focused on driving forward what passes for a plot that the only way for director Dennis Dugan to squeeze in laughs is to insert an interminable number of non-sequiturs, like a Jack Daniels-drinking bird, a homeless man living in a tree, or an Indian boy with a lobster taped to his body.
Sandler and company attempt to distract the audience with an onslaught of cameos from celebrities ranging from Johnny Depp and Shaquille O’Neal to Nick Swardson and Vince the ShamWow guy. Dana Carvey makes his first film appearance in nine years by stealing a day part from some poor SAG extra. The usually-reliable Tim Meadows is given nothing to work with in a superfluous and ill-defined role and comedy god Norm MacDonald is outright wasted in what could’ve been a very funny part as Jill’s unsuspecting Craiglist date. But Jack and Jill seems content to just have these talented comedians appear onscreen, believing that recognition is just as good as (if not better than!) laughter. It is not.
Do not see Jack and Jill. It is sloppy, brutal, racist and a colossal waste of time and talent. If you laugh at any point during the trailer below, I hate you. If you give Adam Sandler your money to see it, you are enabling all the worst tendencies of a once-funny comedian.
“Burn this,” says a grim Al Pacino, sobered after witnessing the final cut of the Dunkin’ Donuts commercial that has driven what passes for Jack and Jill‘s threadbare plot. “No good can ever come from anybody seeing this.”
I know exactly how he feels.
0 Stars (out of 5)
