MOVIE REVIEWS: THAT’S MY BOY

Critics have never figured out just what accounts for the box-office appeal of Adam Sandler. But if they’ve been critical of his performances in the past, they are reviling his latest one in That’s My Boy. Consider some of the adjectives used to describe this movie: bottom-of-the-barrel; moronic; lowbrow; puerile; mean-spirited; charmless; beyond bad; wince-inducing; intolerable. And that’s just from Claudia Puig’s review in USA Today. Linda Barnard in the Toronto Star comments that “gross can be hilarious … when it’s done with smarts and humor. But That’s My Boy just wants to roll around in the dirt, soil its pants and pass out in its own puke.” Saturday Night Live‘s Andy Samberg barely earns passing marks from the critics. Samberg, writes David DeWitt in the New York Times, “rarely rises above wooden, so he’s no match for Mr. Sandler’s brazen choices, which pass 11 on the dial of irritation.” Michael O’Sullivan in the Washington Post acknowledges that Sandler “has his partisans, but the aggressive awfulness of That’s My Boy seems calculated to test even their patience.” But Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune does not similarly mitigate his disdain for the move. “Even with 87.5 years to go, the 21st century may never see a stupider comedy than That’s My Boy,” he writes, “But let’s be positive, and express it as a wish for the film-going masses: May this century never see a stupider comedy.”