Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Review: Just Go With It (2011)

For Valentine's Day, Vanessa and I decided we'd do dinner and a movie.  Picking a movie yesterday was pretty hard, because there wasn't anything out that really jumped out and interested us.  I mean, there was True Grit, but we wouldn't have made it to the theatre in time to see it.  We ended up narrowing it down to two choices: The King's Speech, or Just Go With It.  In a shocking move that will surprise anyone who hasn't read the title of this review, we chose Just Go With It, an Adam Sandler / Jennifer Aniston rom-com.  Gee, I feel like a professional reviewer already!

If you're not familiar with the movie, here's the basic premise: a guy tries to get a girl to date him by pretending to be married to his office assistant.  And they go to Hawaii for some reason (it actually is a funny and somewhat believable reason in the movie, so I won't spoil it.  Not yet anyway.).  Shakespearean hilarity ensues.

To clarify, this isn't based on any Shakespeare play of any kind; I just mean that there's technically disguises and hidden identities and what not going on in this movie, so in a way it's basically based on every Shakespeare comedy out there.  Moving on to the one important bit of the review: I liked the movie, and laughed.  It hit the right points and avoided the typical low Adam Sandler humour you'd find in something like 50 First Dates or Happy Gilmore.  Let us rejoice: Rob Schneider was NOT in this movie.

The movie established some "rules" for the story pretty quickly: Sandler's character had his heart broken in the 80s, and quickly discovered a way to sleaze his way into any woman's bed.  He became unlimitly (is that a word?) rich, and throws money where he wants - BUT, he recognizes that rich people stay rich because they don't just give money to people.  It kind of gets questions like "well how can he afford to just go to Hawaii on a whim?" out of the way so that the story can take over.

Without spoiling anything I can tell you that Sandler of course ends up with Jennifer Aniston's character - that's the trope that's at play in this movie.  There's no question from the start of the film that they're going to end up together; I mean it's pretty much spelled out in the trailer, because we've all seen movies like this before.  But the strength of the movie are the subtle one-liners (and the not-so-subtle jokes too), and the kids.  The kids are really good in this movie.

Other features included a pretty funny-if-not-disturbing cameo appearance by Kevin Nealon, and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Heidi Montag.  It's fitting that she appears in a movie where the main character is a plastic surgeon - and also good that she appears to have a sense of humour about herself.  I assume, anyway.

I definitely recommend this one over No Strings Attached.  I didn't see No Strings Attached, but watch the trailer of both movies - I am fairly certain you'll be able to tell which one is the one to see.

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