Click - DVD review - Pocket-lint

7 February 2007 11:00 GMT / By Dan Hall

Michael Newman (Adam Sandler) is an over worked architect who is spending too much time at the office with his monster of a boss (David Hasselhoff) and not enough with his family.

A spooky salesman called Morty (Christopher Walken) gives Sandler a “Universal Remote” which lets him fast forward through boring dinner parties, traffic jams, family rows and, unforgivably, foreplay with his lovely wife (Kate Beckinsale).

Inevitably things go wrong for Michael and for the film as the action sinks helplessly into a sticky sentimentality that no amount of farting can save.

We've been scratching our heads to come up with reasons to see Click and, after wracking our brains all yesterday, came up with this little lot...

Perhaps you’re nuts about Christopher Walken and want to see everything this brilliant actor does - even the worst film of his career.

Then again, you could be a Happy Days obsessive who just loves Henry Winkler as the Fonz and can’t believe that he really has turned into an old man.

Ahh, perhaps you're the person who voted Kate Beckinsale the 71st sexiest woman in the world in a recent magazine poll. Or you're the world's biggest Baywatch aficionado, but wanted something humiliating and terrible to happen to David Hasselhoff … like appearing in an Adam Sandler movie.

Maybe, just maybe, you’ve been kidnapped by a man with a gun and he’s forcing you into buying this DVD.

If you don’t fit into any of the above categories, but really need to be told that working too hard and not spending enough time with your family is a bad thing then, I’ll save you the price of a the rental for you and spell it out for you now: Family Comes First.

Frank (The Wedding Singer) Coraci's direction is at best competent but mostly the cinema equivalent of a badly executed colouring-in book. Each scene is set up in the most stilted way imaginable with the actors grouped together as in the most amateur of school plays, lines delivered lamely to camera with very little real interaction between the characters whose facial expressions, often, do not even match between shots. It has been shot by numbers with the hapless actors having to perform as if they were rehearsing in front of a mirror.

This, of course is Adam Sandler’s style. His method, learnt from his previous career as a stand up comedian, is to look straight into the lens as he puts on funny faces or funny voices.

When he was young and fresh faced, he brought a certain charm to the screen but, now that he is rounder of face and fuller of figure, his manic, sub-Jim Carey cavorting just comes across as desperate and unconvincing.

Far from engaging us in his dilemma when pressure of work stops him from noticing his loving family, he succeeds in coming across as merely cynical and selfish.

In fact the film, when it is not pushing sentimentality to a new low, has a depressing and bitter tone which is ill at ease with Sandler’s slapstick instincts.

Somewhere in the middle of this drawn out, sickly nonsense is poor old Christopher Walken who plays the mysterious Morty with all his usual quirkiness. Someone should have warned him away from this project – he deserves so much better.

As does Kate Beckinsale who puts in an efficient performance as the long suffering wife and Henry Winkler too who, once you get used to him being a granddad, supplies the only genuine warmth in the whole film.

As for the rest, David Hasselhoff delivers an embarrassingly caricatured self parody which exposes his inability as an actor, Sean Astin, as Bill, “the other man”, has his most nauseating role since Sam the Hobbit in Lord of the Rings and the two children must have topped the class in Hollywood’s Academy for Precociously Cute Kids.

When you’re looking for a button on your remote for this film, it’s not so much fast forward as eject.

For anyone interested – not that there are likely to be many of you out there – there are seven short featurettes, with inspired titles such as "Make Me Old and Fat" and "Humping Dogs”, detailing all the main aspects of Click’s production. In addition, there is a hit-and-miss audio commentary from Sandler, director Frank Coraci, producer Tim Herlihy and writer Steve Korn that offers the odd laugh but little insight into the creative process behind Click. The package is completed by four deleted scenes (which only come to just over 4 minutes in total) that weren’t funny enough to make it into the final cut and would definitely be best viewed on fast forward.

Verdict

Sadly director Coraci cannot match Frank Capra’s great 1946 movie, It’s A Wonderful Life which handles all the same themes but with genius.

Rating: 12A
Staring: Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, Christopher Walken, David Hasselhoff, Henry Winkler, Julie Kavner
Directed by: Frank Coraci
Extras: Audio commentary from members of the cast and crew, Deleted Scenes, Featurettes

Score

Review Recap

Price as reviewed: £20
The good: Walken injects some energy into the otherwise lifeless story, Beckinsale is always easy on the eye, an entertaining cameo from The Hoff - or the “big-headed buffoon” as he is described at one point
The bad: Seeing Sean “Lord of the Rings” Astin in a pair of Speedos, Sandler is ill-equipped for the demands of proper acting that the second half of the film requires, too much gloopy sentimentality and patronising moralising about the importance of family
Quick verdict: Sadly director Coraci cannot match Frank Capra’s great 1946 movie, It’s A Wonderful Life which handles all the same themes but with genius
Score