The surprise about Click, the latest Adam Sandler vehicle, is that it’s not as bad as expected. That’s not to say it’s good – just that about four out of 10 of its attempts at humour are actually funny, as opposed to the more usual average of about two out of 10.
Sandler plays a hard-working architect called Michael Newman, who gets irked by the fact that his household needs several remote-control devices – one for the garage door, one for the TV and so on – and he keeps getting them mixed up. So, one night, in a bit of a snit, he heads off to one of those American mega-stores that conveniently stay open very late.
In this case, it’s Bed, Bath and Beyond, and Michael ends up in the Beyond section, which is staffed by Christopher Walken in an Einstein wig and wearing what one sincerely hopes is a hugely padded stomach. I don’t know what the stomach is doing, dramatically speaking, but the wig is telling is that he’s a mad-scientist type. Hence he provides Michael with the universal remote control device he’s been seeking.
There is, of course, a catch. This universal remote controls more than TVs and garage doors – it controls Michael’s whole life. He can put his kvetching wife (an under-utilised Kate Beckinsale) on pause when he wants to; he can fast-forward through the dull bits of his life. Such wish-fulfilment will surely appeal to us all – wouldn’t we all like to skip the boring, onerous stuff and fast-forward to the nice bits?
Here is the movie’s hook. Its ”high concept” is built on simple wish-fulfilment, which is a very good idea. Unfortunately, as so often happens in Hollywood, it seems that ”high concept” means ”low execution”. Not that the concept is fully worked through, anyway: the universal remote doesn’t exactly give Michael complete control. Rewinding is a bit of a problem and the filmmakers have to build in a tricky caveat to make the plot work out the way they want it to. They duck out of the implications of a device that would really give a character full remote-control access to all his life – forwards, backwards, freeze-frame, slow motion, et cetera. Such a concept awaits the likes of David Lynch for true realisation.
The caveat in Click is inevitable, because this is a mainstream Hollywood movie and Hollywood operates according to moral guidelines as strict as those of the medieval Catholic church, though less imaginative. Michael is going through all this to learn a deep life-lesson: spending time with your family is more important than getting ahead in your career. Presumably he doesn’t watch many mainstream movies, because this seems to be the moral lesson at the heart of most of them.
This is all very obvious. Which wouldn’t matter if the humour made up for it, but the funny moments (and there are a few) are soon suffocated in moral syrup. In any case, Sandler is not nearly as funny as David Hasselhoff in a supporting role – Hasselhoff pretty much steals the picture. So much so that one has to speculate about a promising comic career that didn’t happen, and wish he’d got the lead in Click instead of Sandler. It would have been so much funnier. Perhaps Hasselhoff will make up for it in future films. Oh, for a universal remote control that would work on Holly-wood movies …