REVIEW: Just Go With It (2)

JUST STAY AWAY FROM IT

Nicole Kidman chooses to play saucy adversary to Jennifer Aniston in Just Go With It for some reason, and allows herself to be humiliated in the worst possible way (and repeatedly so). Arguably the biggest comedown for an Oscar-winning actress and one hopes she had a really good excuse for it. Aniston, on the other hand, is having her usual day at work looking 'cutesy clueless' in designer clothes, even though theoretically she's the ordinary secretary of a plastic surgeon rake (Adam Sandler), and a mother of two brats in urgent need of spanking.

Sandler's Danny wears a wedding ring to woo archetypal bimbettes (in this film there isn't even the possibility of any other type of woman) and brags to his assistant about his escapades while he fixes up his rich Beverly Hills patients' eyebrows, breasts, genitals and so on. Katherine (Aniston) doesn't admire her boss' philandering ways, but still manages to be inexplicably accommodating towards him.  

The humour quotient in Dennis Dugan's film touches a new subaltern space deserving a special label of its own. 'Toilet humour' just won't do justice to it. And calling this mess (derived from a French play which was turned into Cactus Flower in 1969 and our own Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya in 2005) a rom-com would require much strain on the imagination. Dugan's idea of romance is a deplorable hero falling for a girl half his age (with big, round breasts, of course) and then using his secretary and her kids to play-act an elaborate charade in order to woo her.

Everyone gets a free vacation to Hawaai, Aniston gets a wardrobe that'll give the Sex And The City girls a serious jab of envy, Sandler gets to chase curvaceous girls and Kidman's Devlin gets to wear a coconut-shelled bra and do a bizarre dance to prove her superiority to Katherine. 

What the audience gets from any of this is anybody's guess.