REVIEW: Just Go With It

GO THE OTHER WAY

For such a lightweight piece of work, this one’s survived many incarnations—from a French play to a Broadway play with several productions the world over, to a Hollywood film, Cactus Flower (1969) to a Hindi film Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya and now a brand new comedy from Hollywood—Just Go With It, directed by Dennis Dugan.

If it were a Bollywood film recycling a now-worthless script, you’d think it was because they had the stars lined up and no screenplay, but why would Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman even want to be in this old-fashioned mess, and why would Sandler want to produce a film that does him no credit as an actor? And because he is in it, the assumption is that people would expect gross-out humour in the film, so it is piled on high.
 
A Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Danny (Sandler) wears a wedding ring, because that is supposedly a ‘chick magnet;’ women cannot resist a married man with a fake tragic story, and he can wriggle out any time he likes, using a fictitious marriage as an excuse. His nurse Katherine (Jennifer Aniston),  single mother of two kids, is his reluctant ally.
 
Then Danny meets the gorgeous 23-year-old Palmer (Brooklyn Decker), and falls for her.  But she finds the ring, he lies that  he is married but his divorce is almost through. She insists on meeting his wife, so he forces Katherine to pretend to be the wife. Danny's buddy Eddie (Nick Swardson), putting on a thick German accent, has to pretend to be Katherine’s fiancé.  Then the kids (one of them speaks a strange Cockney) come into the picture, they all go to Hawai, where Nicole Kidman turns up, and her sole purpose is to have a hula competition with Aniston.
 
The 1969 film starred Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and Goldie Hawn, had a lot more going for it than this one, but the convoluted farce seemed old-fashioned 40 years ago, now seems creaky and crass.
 
Adam Sandler has done a few decent films in the past, but Just Go With It, sends his career into regression; Jennifer Aniston’s choice of films is getting worse by the day and Nicole Kidman must have a secretly plausible reason for doing this film.