Click

This is definitely one of Adam Sandler’s better movies of recent years, keeping his obnoxious antics in check and using them to teach him a lesson. Think of an updated It’s a Wonderful Life where a nowhere near as evil Mr. Potter is the lead character.

Sandler plays Michael Newman (“new man”, get it?), and ambitious young real estate executive who can’t quite balance work and family. Kate Beckinsale plays his unrealistically hot, loving wife and mother to his son and daughter (played by several actors each as the film moves through several decades of Newman’s life). Christopher Walken is the strange staffer in the wa-a-ay beyond department at Bed, Bath & Beyond, David Hasslehoff is Sandler’s obnoxious, piggish boss and Sean Astin is the kids’ swim instructor and, later, Beckinsale’s second husband.

Walken is so good as a snake oil salesman, the essential nature of his character here as in so many great roles he’s done before; his Morty slowly seduces Newman, allowing him to discover the ‘features’ of the special remote at the heart of Click long before its costs surface. As Morty cautioned at the time of purchase, this sale is final, no returns allowed.

Writers Steve Koren (Bruce Almighty, A Night at the Roxbury, many Seinfeld episodes and Saturday Night Live skits) and Mark O’Keefe (co-wrote Bruce Almighty) and director Frank Coraci (The Waterboy, The Wedding Singer) devised a very effective framework, enough funny bits to satisfy core fans (such as the right cross to Hasllehoff’s jaw featured in the ads), dropping in on our man’s life at varying–and increasingly lengthy–intervals before climaxing with a very old, lonely and sad Sandler.

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