There are few comedians who have managed to achieve the same level of success of Adam Sandler. Regardless of the quality of a Sandler film and how much critics might hate his work, he has enough fans to almost guarantee each movie he releases is profitable. The only other comedian I can think of who has experienced a similar level of success, despite the opinions of critics, is Tyler Perry with the Madea films.

Sandler’s brand of comedy has always been pretty consistent, but I feel like it wasn’t until the early 2000s that people (including myself) finally started to catch on to his formula and move away from him. He had hits like Happy Gilmore that secured his Happy Madison production company, but he also had films like Little Nicky that managed to turn plenty of fans away. I enjoyed his early movies, but I wouldn’t classify myself as a fan as I mostly stopped finding Sandler’s style funny after a certain point.

As he started getting older, Sandler’s stories and characters started to transition from those about goofy bachelors to family-focused oddballs. As it happened, 50 First Dates was a movie I recall seeing during this transition period, which also happened to be the last Sandler movie I viewed in theaters. I recalled having a mostly positive opinion of it when I walked out of the theater, but I didn’t remember much else from it. Having watched it again recently for the first time in nearly twenty years, and with a more mature perspective, I think I can assuredly say that it deserves a Fair or Foul review.

What is The Story?

Henry Roth (Adam Sandler) is a vivacious and handsome bachelor (yeah, right…) who manages to seduce women for one-night stands in Hawaii while they’re on their vacations. He always comes up with a story about why he can’t continue the relationship and they return to their regular lives without him, despite being infatuated and in love. When we first meet him, he’s telling a woman a story about being a secret agent or something. In reality, he works at a local Sea World-type amusement park as a veterinarian and animal expert. He’s a man who is not willing to commit to a real relationship and wants to eventually make his boat capable of sailing all the way up to Alaska. His plans slightly change, however, when he meets Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore) at a local café after his ship gets stranded in the bay. They hit it off relatively quickly, have a good time together during breakfast, exchange phone numbers, and go their separate ways for the day with the expectation of meeting up the following day at the café. However, when Lucy returns, she has no memory of Henry and the interaction between the two goes in a drastically different direction.

It’s then explained to Henry and the audience that Lucy was in a car accident a year prior, and she wakes up every day with no memory of anything since the day before the accident. This is the premise that sets up for the romance and comedy of Henry trying to find new and interesting ways to woo her every day, with some mixed results in terms of how successful he is. However, Lucy’s family and friends are not as supportive of the idea, and they seem content to keep making Lucy think it’s the same day every time she wakes up. They do this by giving her old copies of newspapers and resetting various other props around her to keep her calm and blissfully unaware of her amnesia. Will Henry be able to change their minds? How will he make a relationship like this work?

Fair: Drew Barrymore

I’ve not always liked Drew Barrymore, but she does a great job in this movie. She manages to flex her comedic muscles, and she ends up being the key saving grace for 50 First Dates. She also has to show a bit of range here in the instances in which Lucy realizes that she can’t form new long-term memories. Going from having a happy normal day to then realizing that everyone has been lying to you and that your life has been ruined by a freak accident is a revelation that would devastate anyone. Barrymore does a good job of playing a person who is trying to keep her optimism and humor in this situation. Lucy is a sympathetic character on her own, and Barrymore’s charm helps elevate the character to make her likable and worth sticking around to the end to see what happens. The same cannot be said for her co-stars, however.

Foul: Adam Sandler & Rob Schneider

While these two individuals had their share of funny moments in previous Sandler movies like The Waterboy and Big Daddy, boy…. they are the worst part of 50 First Dates. First of all, the whole idea of Adam Sandler being a suave Casanova capable of wooing women while they’re on vacation, and managing to convince them that he’s the greatest thing they’ve ever experienced, is a bit of a stretch. I’m willing to assume he has some charm, but the movie opens with a montage of different women talking about how they were swept off their feet by the most amazing, handsome man. Maybe that is the joke? I’d be willing to believe it if it was Chris Hemsworth, Henry Cavil, or Val Kilmer from 40 years ago, but Sandler? This just comes across as self-indulgent, ego-building nonsense, especially when Sandler’s character is basically the same character he’s been playing in every movie since Big Daddy. He’s snarky, tells jokes at other people’s expense, and does very little to give his character much depth beyond a guy who just magically fell in love with an amnesiac. And since his comedic preferences seem to get in the way of him doing any drama or emotional scenes, you can’t take him seriously when it’s supposed to be serious. Thankfully he leaves that to more competent actors.

As for Schneider, he’s doing a weird caricature of a Polynesian man named Ula with an accent that does not stay consistent. He’s supposed to be Hawaiian, but he simply cannot portray the character without coming across as ignorant and off-putting. I don’t get offended by these type of performances, but it definitely did not sit well with me. It’s not Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffany’s in terms of its offensiveness, but it is definitely bad enough that I would have preferred he just been the illiterate immigrant from Big Daddy on vacation if he needed to be in this movie at all. All the scenes in which Schneider is present actively drag the movie down. The jokes are mostly slapstick and aren’t funny aside from the one in which Drew Barrymore chases him with a bat. If his character had been cut from the movie, it would have been an improvement. Sure, there wouldn’t be as many moments of expository dialogue for us to find out about Henry Roth’s desires for travel or the conflict he has about falling for a girl, but Sandler doesn’t make the character interesting enough for that to matter anyway.

FAIR: SUPPORTING CAST

Thankfully, to make up for the charm vacuums of Schneider and Sandler are the supporting characters, namely Lucy’s brother Doug (Sean Astin) and her father Marlin (Blake Clark). The jokes centered around Doug’s obsession with bodybuilding are funny and his character is made funnier by the lisp that Astin gives him. He’s overly aggressive towards Henry as a protective brother, but is easily thwarted in every confrontation. Eventually, however, he starts to come around and realize Henry is treating his sister with respect and cares for her. Likewise, Marlin is also protective of Lucy, but in a way that comes across as a stubborn father who is trying to keep his daughter happy without being sure sure of any other way to help her. Both Astin and Clark do a good job of playing people who are trying to put on a good face for Lucy, despite having gone through the motions every day for a year. When the illusion is broken one day and Lucy comes home early, Marlin immediately recognizes it as a “bad day” and the two of them are quick to console her. I’m not going to say that their performances are amazing and deserving of awards, but they do a good job at giving the second half of the film a solid emotional grounding to the story that makes you root for everyone to get what they want.

Other supporting characters that stand out are the owners of the café played by Pomaika’i Brown and Amy Hill. The scenes they are in are decent because they’re able to make the typical Sandler humor less of a drag. The movie kind of forgets about them after the halfway point and they never appear again, but these smaller side characters have enough personality to be memorable. I would have rather spent more time with them than Rob Schneider.

Foul: Disbelief Suspension Required

The whole premise of 50 First Dates is far-fetched, even more far-fetched than other Sandler films.

The human mind is incredibly complex. So, the idea that a person could have an accident that specifically affects the ability to form new memories at the end of a day, and no other negative trauma, is absurd. Whatever accident Lucy Whitmore experienced, she couldn’t have had her entire head hit something; it would have had to have been a pin-prick sharp object that hit her brain just right. Otherwise, she would likely have some other side effects like a speech impediment, motor-movement impairment, or a slight palsy at the very least.

Now, you might be saying “It’s a romantic comedy. What’s the big deal? This genre does this sort of thing all the time.” If you are saying that, you’re right. It’s not a big deal, but when the far-fetched nature of the story is backed up by fake science in a movie, it stands out. When it’s magical or fantasy, the far-fetched nature of a movie’s premise matters a lot less, because you can just disregard it. Take a very similar movie as an example. Groundhog’s Day requires you to accept the fact that Bill Murray’s character Phil is reliving the same day over and over again. He’s the only one forming new memories, while everyone else is going through their own events of the day when he wakes up. There’s no scientific explanation; there’s not even really a magical one. He just wakes up and has to relive the same day until something significant happens, which you could interpret as getting the girl to fall in love with him, or just becoming a better person in general. We’re able to look past the premise of Groundhog’s Day and enjoy the laughs and romance because the movie doesn’t try to explain the situation. In fact, at some point, Phil admits that he has no idea why it’s happened, and he just resigns himself to it. The premise is simple enough to get away with it. 50 First Dates gets a little bogged down by its premise in that you not only have to suspend your disbelief, but you have to accept that the other characters would really continue a charade for a full year without trying other methods of keeping Lucy content with her situation.

In addition, you also have to accept the typical romance clichés, like when a guy falls in love with a girl at first sight, for example. But it’s not just any guy who does this, it’s the heartthrob Henry Roth, who bangs and dumps women all the time. The man who is afraid of commitment. The man whose dream and goal is to finish his boat so he can sail to the arctic. No real event changes his trajectory in life other than meeting Lucy in a café and hitting it off. I don’t know about you, but having a nice breakfast with a pretty lady would be great, just not enough to make me change my life goals. I would be even more hesitant about changing my plans if someone explained to me that this woman I just met has brain damage and won’t remember me tomorrow. It’s certainly noble that Roth sticks it out and becomes interested in giving Lucy a more rewarding life than the illusion of waking up to the same day over and over, but it is not the most believable. Whatever, it’s a romantic comedy, right?

Fair: Second Half

If you are able to look past the less believable parts of the movie and the opening scenes with Sandler and Schneider, 50 First Dates opens up more by the end. This particular point is tied to all the other Fair points I mentioned in that things start to improve as soon as the movie becomes more about Lucy and less about Henry. The jokes tend to land a bit more because the supporting characters and Drew Barrymore’s chemistry help make the comedy work. And while I’m not a big sucker for sentimentality, the way the film portrays the support of Lucy’s family, friends, and even her slightly jaded doctor (played by Dan Aykroyd), is uplifting. When Henry tries the new method of having her wake up to a video that informs her of her accident and condition, instead of the previous methods, you want it to work and not mentally hurt her like a ‘bad day’ when the illusion is broken. Things do not go perfectly later on in the movie, and there’s the expected low point, but there is a fair amount of hope in the latter half with a satisfying ending that helps elevate 50 First Dates’ experience. Yeah, it’s a romantic comedy, so you expect it to work out, but when the condition of Lucy is so serious, you can’t help but share the hope the other characters seem to have.

Verdict: Fair

When I put on 50 First Dates for the first time in decades, I was cringing and sighing a lot through the first half. I wasn’t even sure I was going to make it to the end, because I simply did not remember how the movie started or how bad some of the jokes were. That being said, I was happy I stuck it out. The premise is ridiculous, its main star drags down the quality of the movie, and the hopefulness of the movie is cheesy. However, I think that some key performances and the way the movie focuses more on Barrymore’s character in the second half save 50 First Dates from falling into Foul territory. It’s not a movie I recommend, but if you can make it past the first thirty minutes, it’s a movie that starts to be just good enough to make it worth watching.

Dagon Dogs Posts