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Adam Sandler on Netflix

PEOPLE LOVE TO HATE ADAM SANDLER AS MUCH AS THEY love to love him. His deals with Netflix seem to have kicked this tendency into overdrive. He’s currently one movie into his second four-picture deal with them—a partnership that, since 2015, has produced five features (average Rotten Tomatoes rating: 22 percent) and the standup special Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh (2018). The hack line is that he’s phoning it in for an obscene amount of money, and this objection seems to be as much about the form as the content. He’s still making broad, shaggy comedies, often with goofy premises (in The Do-Over, estranged high school friends fake their own deaths) and preposterous twists (the Do-Over friends end up curing cancer).

I eagerly awaited seeing Sandler and Jennifer Aniston lead an Agatha Christie riff in , and had a humanism reminiscent of Jean Renoir, it sounded slightly hyperbolic, but intriguing. If the Netflix films were taken more seriously, would have been heralded as the exciting feature directorial debut of Robert Smigel (creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and co-screenwriter of ). It’s a gaspingly funny, disarmingly sweet ensemble comedy that includes a Greek chorus of hard-of-hearing aunties, an extended storyline about stolen valor, and a reverse heist that involves getting a large number of live bats into City Hall. Smigel orchestrates a cast of dozens (including Chris Rock, Steve Buscemi, and Rachel Dratch), trusting his performers to bring a grounding humanity to their characters, however ridiculous, and avoiding the bane of so much contemporary comedy: overwriting. Sandler plays it straight as Kenny Lustig, a loving, beleaguered patriarch cheerfully masking the strain of constant assaults on his pride and his pocketbook in the run-up to his daughter’s wedding.