Film Reviews

Click

• Rating:
• Director: Frank Coraci
• Starring: Adam Sandler
• Details: US / 107mins (12A).

Staring: Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, Christopher Walken, David Hasselhoff.

Someone thought the following was a good idea: take Dickens' A Christmas Carol, mix it with the channel-hopping 'comedy' Stay Tuned, have Adam Sandler doing Adam Sandler, get Christopher Walken to camp it up as a mad professor type, push David Hasselhoff into self-parody territory, and it's bound to be a hit. It may sound like a laugh and it should have been, but Click fails, and fails terribly as a comedy. Michael Newman (Sandler) is struggling to cope with his demanding job, the pressures of his home life and the too many remote controls in his house. On his way to a department store in search of a universal remote, Michael (Sandler) stumbles into the eccentric inventor Morty (Walken), who presents him with an all-purpose remote control. Michael takes it home and finds that not only does it work with every appliance in the house; it also works on his family - he can turn down the volume of his loud children, fast-forward through boring evenings at home and skip a few chapters to his promotion at work months later. Soon, Michael finds that he is ruining his life but any attempts to get rid of the remote prove fruitless. Click is one of the frustratingly lazy comedies you'll ever see. There was a mountain of gags just waiting to be excavated but the writers - Steve Koren and Mark O'Keefe (Bruce Almighty) - either didn't see them or just didn't bother, seemingly content to coast along, doing the bare minimum. Sandler fans will feel gypped, as the man is on cruise control here, never once breaking out from the straightjacketed character he's been dealt and seems unsure if this is an out-an-out comedy or a heartfelt, reflective story. His co-stars fare no better: Hasselhoff tries to outdo Christopher McDonald in the smarmy stakes but never reaches that Shooter McGavin high water mark, while Walken is more embarrassing than funny, with not one comic line to quip.

Review by Gavin Burke