THAT’S MY BOY

US, 2012,
Adam Sandler, Andy Sandberg, Leighton Meester.
Directed by Steve Anders.

That’s My Boy is not going to make any converts to Adam Sandler comedies. In fact, it might well alienate some audiences and satisfy only his die-hard fans. This is a pity since Sandler, even as his frequent child-man persona, can be very funny.

This one is overall ugly. And, over all, not particularly funny unless you want to go again into the grossly raucous jokes that have been a staple of many films, each trying to outdo the other in what they can get away with. This one is incessantly crass, frequently gross. Sacha Baron Cohen can get away with a lot because he has many satiric points to make. Ted and The Hangover can get away with a lot because there is some wit in there among the gross and the dross. That’s My Boy is more in the tradition of The Hangover II (the less than funny one).

It begins with a theme that is risky these days for broad comedy: a teacher seducing a (very much more than willing) teenage student at school. While she does go to prison, he is hailed at an assembly of students and staff as a local hero. At a time when society is trying to deal with sexual molestation and abuse, this opening is dubious in tone to say the least. Along the way, there are a lot of sexual shenanigans amongst most of the characters and some leering from most of the rest, including a promiscuous grandmother and a brother and sister.

The teacher is played by Eva Amurri and, in the present, by her mother Susan Sarandon – though that doesn’t really offer any more respectability to the film. James Caan as a pugnacious Irish priest definitely doesn’t contribute any respectability.

The schoolboy grows up into Adam Sandler whose moral fibre is pretty tenuous, though he is meant to have a soft heart underneath all the four (and beyond) letter bravado and drunken, slavering posturing (and more) that seems to be the be-all and end-all of his life. Since the school teacher was pregnant when she went to jail, the boy, Donnie, has to bring up his son. The son (Andy Samberg) has, reasonably, run off from his father and is now a successful financier about to get married. The action takes place over a few days, enough for father to come to exploit his son for money so that he won’t go to jail for not paying back taxes, enough for son to loathe his father, enough for all the wedding guests to think that Donnie is just the man. And, of course, son will be helped to drink, vomit and behave sexually as his father does, and, of course again, to get to like his father and be proud of him.

There are radio and TV shows which, seriously or comically, ask panelists to choose films which they would show to alien visitors to explain human life. If the aliens were able to sit through That’s My Boy, they would discover some lowest common denominators.