That's My Boy (2012)
Directed by Sean Anders
While in his teens, Donny fathered a son, Todd, and raised him as a single parent up until Todd's 18th birthday. Now, after not seeing each other for years, Todd's world comes crashing down when Donny resurfaces just before Todd's wedding.
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14 films that influenced That's My Boy
What critics say influenced That's My Boy
Complete with funny voice (never a good sign in a Sandler performance), mullet haircut and love for hard rock classics played on tape cassette, Donnie is the type of character who could easily fit in a 1980s era Meatballs rip-off.
That's right: The lame rapper is playing a fictionalized version of himself, but it doesn't exactly set off Being John Malkovich vibes.
Alas, it’s a minor offense in “That’s My Boy,” a no-holds-barred raunch-fest that combines bits of “Saturday Night Live” skits and “The Hangover” with every ugly Sandler laugher ever made.
Realizing that his brand of vulgar comedy has been surpassed by movies like “Bridesmaids” and “The Hangover,” he has gone all-out.
Just when you expect them to turn on Donny, they fall in behind him instead, and the result is a bachelor party that makes The Hangover look like a church social.
This is Sandler's attempt to crash "The Hangover" party, and it will be interesting to see how his audience responds.
A bachelor party trip to a men's spa is a highlight as it takes its time and raises the bar, culminating in an outrageously delivered one-liner from Ana Gasteyer (2008's " The Women "), playing the outwardly relaxed, inwardly sexually frustrated spa guide Mrs. Ravensdale.
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That's My Boy is one of those comedies about a walking irritant, like What About Bob?, in which the joke ?
Budweiser’s brand presence in this film is more shameful (and less self aware) than the product placement in Wayne’s World [pictured below].
It was like the joy of The Wedding Singer and Happy Gilmore combined with yet another great wig sitting there like a cherry on top of a gorgeous sundae.
Sandler is in full pandering Gen X nostalgia mode here, à la The Wedding Singer ; at worst this means an extended cameo for Vanilla Ice , but for all that, there is far more generosity of spirit and more dumb laffs in Sandler’s latest wicked pissah, a paean to let-it-all-hang-out party-guy sloppiness, than in the sterile, Glee-perky Rock of Ages.
In That’s My Boy, Adam Sandler brings it all together: The hot-for-teacher romance of Billy Madison, the ’80s nostalgia of The Wedding Singer, the class jabs of Happy Gilmore, the competing product placements, the horny grandmas, the random celebrity cameos and the attempts at ethnic humor that fall somewhere between offensive and a parody of offense.
All the things that make his previous worst efforts (I still quite like "The Wedding Singer" and "Anger Management") so hard to sit through.
Sporting a mullet wig that looks left over from “ The Wedding Singer ” and recycling his trademark accent -- an annoying hybrid of brain-damaged redneck and dirty old man -- he packs enough painful screen presence for three people.
If you like this, try: “Billy Madison” and “The Wedding Singer”…
A gross-out comedy can be both clever and funny (see There's Something About Mary) even with stupid characters doing stupid things.
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At this point the movie is a cross between “Meet The Parents” and the recent Sandler bomb “Jack Aand Jill.”
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Directed by Larry Charles
I had to turn away from the screen at times—apologies to the sisterhood of acceptance of all body types but the more I saw of Donny’s best stripper friend (the zaftig Luenell, who played the hooker in Borat) topless or pole dancing, the queasier I felt.
Todd's best man Phil's (SNL's Will Forte) idea of a stag party is found lacking, so Donny takes charge, calling in his old friends Champale (Luenell, "Borat," "Think Like a Man") and her daughter Brie (Ciara) at the Bacon and Leggs strip club (Route 1 in Peabody's Cabaret Lounge), but things get more personal when Donny takes Todd to visit his Uncle Van - Vanilla Ice (in a surprisingly appealing performance), now cooking chicken nuggets with 'Diff'rent Strokes' Todd Bridges.