‘Big Daddy’ contributes to cultural decline

IN THEATERS

Big Daddy

In “Big Daddy,” Dennis Dugan’s latest contribution to the decline of our culture, Adam Sandler is Sonny Koufax, a 32-year-old slacker who graduated from law school yet prefers to work one day a week at a Manhattan tollbooth.

The film has big problems with that as it paints the self-obsessed (and borderline sociopathic) Sonny in a most unflattering light. His friends are all good-looking, well-scrubbed, successful lawyers earning big bucks while Sonny is a frumpy, hygienically challenged mess of bad breeding who plays the stock market with the $200,000 he won after a taxi ran over his foot.

The casting here is perfect — even if the film isn’t. Who better than the childlike Sandler to play a childlike, irresponsible schmuck with one bright idea: In an effort to win back his girlfriend, he adopts Julian, a recently orphaned boy (played by twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse) who suddenly appears on his doorstep. The reason for the adoption? Sonny feels that raising a child will make him look more mature and responsible, a stand-up kind of guy worthy of his girlfriend and her respect.

If none of this makes your heart melt, then perhaps a sampling of the film’s dialogue will: “Man,” Sonny says to the 5-year-old Julian, “this Yoo-Hoo is good. Know what’s even better? Smokin’ dope.” Yes, it’s true, that’s all side-splitting funny, and to think it comes only moments after Sonny teaches Julian to urinate on a building.

To be fair, none of this is nearly as offensive as the film’s rampant product plugging (clearly, Sandler owes his soul to McDonald’s and Pepsi), but what is remarkable is how few laughs Sandler mines from his material.

“Big Daddy” isn’t sure what it wants to be — a comedy, a romantic comedy, an extended commercial for the restaurant Hooters, a piece of offensive, sexist trash that undermines and ridicules women, or — worse — a starring vehicle for Adam Sandler.

It wants its audience to believe that it has a big heart and that Sandler is worth $20 million per film, but don’t buy it. In spite of its gentle feel, the film has a quiet mean streak underscored with misogyny. Its bathroom humor isn’t clever, but crude. Is this really what audiences want? A film about a 5-year-old boy being used as a pawn by a sexist adult male so the adult male can get it on with his ex?

Apparently so.

Grade: C-

ON VIDEO

The Thin Red Line

In spite of endless comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” Terrence Malick’s World War II epic “The Thin Red Line” is no “Saving Private Ryan” at all — it’s not meant to be.

It’s cerebral where the other was flashy, a web of paradoxes and ironies where Ryan was more literal. It’s strangely surreal, yet absolutely true to the war it depicts. It features strong performances, yet has no central protagonist. It is beautifully shot, can be terrifically gripping, yet lacks cohesion, flow and emotional impact.

It’s not so much a film about war as it is a film about the effects of war. With clear leanings toward Buddhism, the film is more concerned with the internal landscape (in this case, meditations on the soul, mortality and one’s relationship with God and nature), than with the external landscape (in this case, Guadalcanal). It follows no formula, has no plot, it’s too long by a third and it takes great risks in the name of art — yes, art — which the film finds almost exclusively in nature.

But the film is a curious mess because of its affinity to nature; indeed, it gives more time to its lush, rolling hillsides and stunning canopy of sun-lit trees than it does to its nonexistent plot or to its characters, none of whom emerge as wholly realized individuals in spite of a good cast including Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, John Cusack and Woody Harrelson.

Unlike Spielberg, who plays to his audience because he has never fully trusted his audience, Malick never considers his audience because he’s not a crowd-pleaser. He is motivated by the intangible, interested in the deeper truth, focused on the thin red line of complexity, while unafraid to cross that line into the sometimes confusing sphere of paradox.

If none of this sounds as if “The Thin Red Line” is worth seeing, it is. The film has its considerable triumphs, particularly in Malick’s extremely well-choreographed battle sequences, where his thematic elements of Edenic nature vs. mankind clash headlong into surrealism — and gut-wrenching reality.

Grade: B

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His film reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS. Tonight on WLBZ’s News Center 5:30 Today and News Center Tonight, he appears in The Video Corner.