ADAM SANDLER’S EIGHT CRAZY NIGHTS [ 1/2]
Bah, humbug. Running time: 75 minutes. Rated PG-13 (frequent crude and sexual humor, drinking and brief drug references). At the Empire, the Lincoln Square, the Battery Park, others.
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IN the spirit of the season, one ought to say something nice about this, Adam Sandler’s third movie in six months.
Well, it’s short.
The animated, Hanukkah-themed musical is, in fact, 75 minutes worth of belching, barfing and poo-jokes braided into a Grinch-meets-Scrooge-meets-“It’s a Wonderful Life” storyline that’s as stale as last year’s potato latkes.
There are a handful of genuinely comical moments in “Eight Crazy Nights,” but the whole thing reeks of a super-indulgent, cobbled-together vanity trip by a star whose ego obviously leads him to believe he can put anything on screen, attach his name to it – and they (“they” being the 25-year-old male demographic) will come.
Proof of this comes with the incongruous live-action short film tacked on to the beginning, which features Sandler’s dog, Meatball, panting around town doing not much in a pretty unfunny way.
The cartoon proper, based on a skit from Sandler’s comedy album “Stan and Judy’s Kid,” opens with Davey Stone (voiced by Sandler) emitting a spectacles-shattering belch in a diner.
Davey is an alcoholic 33-year-old Jewish guy described as “the head honcho of holiday humbug” – basically, yet another version of Sandler’s increasingly tiresome “angry young man” persona.
Determined that the townsfolk of Dukesberry (rhymes with Pukesberry) not enjoy the season, he goes on a vandalizing rampage and is sentenced to 10 years in prison.
But Davey is saved by the intervention of a kindly, Yoda-like basketball referee named Whitey (also voiced – annoyingly – by Sandler) and over the course of the eight days of Hanukkah, Whitey instills in Davey the spirit of the season.
The film, directed by TV cartoon helmer Seth Kearsley, is all over the map tonally, switching from sappy love duets and heartfelt sermons to gross-out jokes about sweaty jockstraps and songs about flatulent reindeer. (Sample lyric: “I hate folks who think reindeer are cute/To me they’re just something to shoot.”)
Unbelievably, Sandler even misfires on the much-touted new version of his popular “Hanukkah Song,” simply “outing” his latest list of Jewish celebrities in a song played over the credits.
The crude animation has the look of a Saturday morning cartoon and, although the antics of Whitey’s dippy, bewigged sister Eleanore (Sandler again) are often hilarious, this puerile, mean-spirited and pointless exercise leaves a bad aftertaste.
It’s a lazy, disappointing return to form after the eye-opening performance Sandler gave under Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction in “Punch-Drunk Love.”