1364. The Do-Over (2016)

Starring: Adam Sandler, David Spade, Paula Patton

Director: Steven Brill

Running Time: 108 mins

The Do-Over is an American film about two old friends who, after faking their own deaths, find themselves unexpectedly thrown into a world of even more trouble with their new identities.

I just don’t get why we can’t ever get a good Adam Sandler film. Sure, he’s made some good comedies over the last twenty years, but recently, even with the might of Netflix behind Happy Madison, Sandler’s films have been consistently poor, and that’s exactly the case with The Do-Over: a dull, unfunny and typically ugly film that’s pretty difficult to get all the way through.

In short, this film is very poor, but it’s by no means the worst Adam Sandler film ever. The one positive that I did take away from The Do-Over is that its story is okay. It’s completely predictable and stupid, but there are moments (particularly towards the final act) when the film focusses a little more on what’s actually going on with the whole crime aspect of the story instead of trying desperately to be funny, meaning that there were a select few moments when I did care about this film.

Apart from that, however, this is your typical Adam Sandler movie, with nothing in the way of good comedy anywhere in sight. I maybe smirked a couple of times, but I definitely didn’t laugh once in The Do-Over. The humour is just so generically stupid and predictable, always playing on the same sort of gross-out and foul-mouthed humour that has plagued the worst Sandler films for years, and at this point, it’s not only unfunny, but extremely frustrating to have to sit through.

The action is pretty average too. Of course, having a predictable plot that I didn’t care about for the majority of the runtime meant that I didn’t feel any sense of high stakes, but even so, the action and fight scenes in this film are just so underwhelming. Even though Adam Sandler does try to act like a Bond-ish badass in some scenes, the action is directed so plainly, and constantly interrupted by unfunny jokes, which meant that I just felt nothing watching them.

Overall, The Do-Over, whilst not being the worst Sandler movie you’ve ever seen, is a dull watch, with terrible comedy, sub-par acting and directing and, even though a few moments in the final act caught my eye, a hugely predictable story, and that’s why it gets a 4.9 from me.