Grandma's Boy
Directed by Nicholaus Goosen
Written by Barry Wernick,
Allen Covert, Nick Swardson
Starring Allen Covert, Linda
Cardellini and Doris Roberts
Classification: 14A
Rating: *½
An Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler, it turns out, is not necessarily an improvement. Sandler functions as a producer for Grandma's Boy, a film written and starring several of his cohorts from previous comedies. The result is a pile-up of the usual no-brow comedy elements -- masturbation, flatulence, big breasts and randy old ladies, along with a few new additions, including an African witch-doctor and a kung-fu-fighting chimpanzee.
At the centre, of course, is a late-blooming slacker star who comes into his own through the love of a peppy and inexplicably adoring woman. Sandler-surrogate and Mel Gibson look-a-like Allen Covert (also one of the writers) plays Alex, a 35-year-old games tester and stoner who finds he has to stay with his grandmother (Doris Roberts of Everybody Loves Raymond), who shares a house with two other elderly women, the hot-to-trot Eva (Shirley Jones) and the drug-addled Bea (Shirley Knight).
Alex is slavering over his new boss, Samantha (Linda Cardellini, most recently seen in Brokeback Mountain), who wears hip-hugging business suits and has no trouble motivating the staff of virginal nerds to put in overtime debugging the company's newest game. Even the game's genius-freak creator, J. P. (Joel Moore), who wears long Matrix coats and holds debates with himself in robot voices, is creepily smitten.
By the movie's halfway mark, it becomes obvious that Grandma's Boy is all premise, no plot. Instead of story momentum, we're subjected to repeat sequences of J. P. twitching, Alex engaging in video-game and insult battles with adolescent boys, and visits to Alex's hippie dope-dealer (Paul Dante). Along the way there are the obligatory humour-free cameos from Sandler's Saturday Night Live buddies Rob Schneider, David Spade and Kevin Nealon.
Thanks to the affable performances, Grandma's Boy comes across as more inane than offensive. Covert's sleepy-eyed deadpan style suggests it's not really important whether you find him funny or not. Cardellini pushes much harder to show her respectable comic range. As for the trio of older actresses, Roberts, Jones and Knight, you can give them your sympathy: They've already won their Oscars and Emmys and now they have a right to supplement their pensions.
Liam Lacey