"So there's this guy - he's a holiday romance Casanova-type. There’s this girl — she's pretty, smart and kind. They meet, they fall in love - but the twist is, she's got short-term amnesia! So she never remembers who he is! Pretty cute, huh? And we get Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore to play 'em! It's like, The Wedding Singer meets Memento!"
But what a damp squib. Adam Sandler leaves the restrained charm of The Wedding Singer at the door and reverts instead to the arrogance and cockiness present in all his other films, playing Henry Roth, who falls for Drew's amnesiac Lucy. The film is chock-full of hopeless cutesy supporting characters: the is-she-a-lesbian-or-a-man co-worker; the old Hawaiian man who makes rude, and therefore funny, pithy quips at Henry's attempts at romance; and not forgetting the 'hilarious' comedy walrus Henry looks after at the aquarium. Good God.
The hackneyed attempts to replicate the simple charm of the Wedding Singer is cringeingly apparent. Henry plays Lucy a wistful tune on the guitar, singing along in his reedy, girly voice, and the soundtrack even features a dreadful The Little Mermaid-style version of Hold Me Now —the Thompson Twins song used in the superior 1998 movie.
Drew is the only redeeming factor in this horrible mess of a film — her calm, luminous charm lifts this film above the drossy mess it would have been otherwise. Apart from this, it's full of lazy scenes, comatose plot development, jerky direction and Adam Sandler at his most irritating.
50 First Dates
Cert: 12A
