50 First Dates Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)February 13th, 2004
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Groundhog Day meets Memento in 50 First Dates, a film that re-teams the stars of the surprise 1998 hit The Wedding Singer, only with far less success. More alarming, however, is the fact that Dates is yet another offering to the increasingly alarming stockpile of American entertainment products which revolve around memory loss and manipulation (The Butterfly Effect, Paycheck, Alias, and the upcoming Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). It's the latest craze! If memory movies could somehow be combined with the Atkins diet, somebody would get filthy rich off of it.
Returning to the Hawaii locale that served as the backdrop for one of 2002's best kiss scenes (from Punch Drunk Love), Adam Sandler plays Henry Roth, a zoologist who gets vacationing women to give up the booty in what has become a lifetime of one-week flings. Enter local girl Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore, Duplex), who Henry meets-cute over waffles and smelly fish hands. The two hit it off, but the next day, Lucy blows a mystified Henry off.
Turns out Lucy has, courtesy of a freak automobile accident involving a cow, no short-term memory. When she goes to sleep at night, her mind is wiped clean and she wakes up thinking it's the day before her accident. And that leaves the rest of Dates open for Henry to take multiple stabs at connecting with Lucy, eventually enlisting the help of stoner pal Ula (Rob Schneider), as well as Lucy's father (Blake Clark) and brother (Sean Astin).
Dates is way closer to a being a post-There's Something About Mary Farrelly brothers movie than Sandler's typical fare, right down to using freakishly odd locals, making its talent look extra-goofy, and shoving a saccharine ending down our throats even though we just want to see more people hit with baseball bats. Parts of Dates, especially when we see the painstaking lives the Whitmores lead in an attempt to keep Lucy's illness from her, are almost downright touching, though I think that has a lot to do with the context of the film. Since you don't exactly expect a Sandler picture to offer sap, it plays much more successfully.
Sandler, who is without a screenwriting credit for the second film in a row, comes off completely unbelievable as a ladies' man who is equal parts Ace Ventura and Dr. Dolittle. Why in the world would anyone with his setup (a different woman every week, with no strings attached) waste his time trying to woo a local who has a fairly debilitating mental illness? Even though Dates is a light romantic comedy, this plot hole in George Wing's debut script is a fairly distracting one.
Barrymore does what she needs to, playing her Lucy to the extremes of the emotional spectrum (ridiculously happy to blindingly weepy) about as well as you could expect from a picture this inconsequential. Schneider, as usual, steals most of the scenes he's in. Small supporting roles from such characters as Sarcastic Wheelchair Guy and 10-Second Tom are effective and those actors should appear familiar to aficionados of the Sandler pantheon. Ditto for the brief but clever references to the Callahan family from Tommy Boy, which, like Dates, was directed by Peter Segal (Anger Management).
1:32 - PG-13 for crude sexual humor and drug references (on appeal)
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