Bedtime Stories.

"Bedtime Stories, starring Adam Sandler, is a great example of how a sweet, simple pitch can be tugged in so many directions by competing desires that it gets ripped to shreds," writes James Rocchi for Redbox. "The film's set-up, for example, establishes Sandler's character - but it's boredom on a stick for any kids in the audience. And the computer-generated hamster will make kids laugh - or, based on how often director Adam Shankman cuts away to it, that's the desired effect - but it'll repel grown-ups who want the saucier, sassier Sandler they know from films like Billy Madison and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Bedtime Stories is made to have something for everyone, and winds up offering very little to anybody."

"While no one was expecting the live-wire daring of Punch-Drunk Love or even You Don't Mess With the Zohan, the Adam Sandler who shows up in Bedtime Stories is that most unnecessary of movie-star guises: the benign family-comedy guy," sighs Tim Grierson in the Voice.

"Adam Sandler is at that difficult age," notes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Now 42, he's too old to continue with the bungling, man-child shtick of yore, yet too young to transition to old-fogey infantilism."

"After sitting through this fractious fairy tale, we feel as plucked as a Christmas goose," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "[I]f Shankman was aiming for The Princess Bride's mix of fantasy, facetiousness and romance, or even the meta-fable sprawl of Stardust, he missed it by a mile."

"A handyman at a luxury hotel that, in its initial motel incarnation, was owned by his father (Jonathan Pryce), Skeeter Bronson (Adam Sandler) is asked by his grating killjoy sister (Courteney Cox, naturally) to babysit his niece and nephew, a chore to which he first grudgingly agrees and then wholeheartedly embraces once he discovers that the bedtime stories he invents for them each night are coming true," explains Nick Schager in Slant. "Typical of the entire enterprise's sloppiness, the reason for these magical circumstances is left fuzzy (it has something to do with Skeeter's imaginative father and wishing)."

"Sandler's laziness, sloppiness, and cynical pandering are all over Bedtime Stories, and it turns what's intended to be a graceful intersection of fairytale whimsy and real-world slapstick into an ugly, head-on collision," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"[W]atching Bedtime Stories is about as delightful as peeking into your Christmas stocking and finding it empty except for a few lint-covered peppermints," writes Jette Kernion in Cinematical.

"There's a surface liveliness to the movie, but it has that plasticky Disney quality and lack of real heart," finds the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

"With Bedtime Stories, Sandler continues his winning streak of appealing and humane comedies," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Maybe it was seeing how PT Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002) went wrong (turning whimsy into dark paranoia) that convinced Sandler how movies ought to entertain."

Posted by dwhudson at December 26, 2008 9:31 AM