Adam Sandler Dries Up
There was a time, around the mid nineties, when Adam Sandler was a funny guy. Films like Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy had audiences regularly chortling, guffawing and snorting. Then the decline began. As his forties loomed on the horizon, the comedic value of seeing a man in his mid-thirties act like a teenager, as he had in the earlier films, began to crash.
Sandler discovers another of his movies has gone 'Straight to HBO'.
Sandler started his comedic rise to fame after appearing in The Cosby Show in the eighties. Soon he was making movies like Airheads, Coneheads and the lesser-known Dickheads. In 1995, he starred in what many considered to be the film that started his ‘purple patch’, Billy Madison. In the film, he plays an immature man who can’t grow up and has to repeat grades 1 to 12 in order to inherit the family business. In 1996, Sandler starred in Happy Gilmore, about a hockey player, an angry young man who can’t grow up, who takes on the golf world to save an elderly relative’s house. A pattern was starting to form. In 1998’s The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy, the trend continued, seeing characters who acted immaturely for their age struggling to make it in a grown up world.
Many thought he had made a visible progression with 1999’s Big Daddy, where he played…an immature man struggling to make it as a grown-up …but while being a surrogate dad to a young kid. This miniscule step forward was written off by Sandler’s next offering, in 2000’s Little Nicky, where he played…well, you can guess.
After discovering the comedy grave he was digging himself, Sandler moved to serious roles, even winning critical plaudits with his performances in 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love and this 2007’s Reign Over Me. These, unfortunately, were only blips. Sandler, it seemed, could not resist what came naturally and reverted to doing tired old re-runs of his former scripts, climaxing with 2006’s vomit-bucket Click and 2007’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, this time drawing in otherwise funny guy, Kevin James into the pot of comedy crap.
After the slating his latest film received, Sandler has eschewed interviews and the media. Sources close to the ‘actor’ say he just spends his time wondering around his house, wearing his high school football gear while reciting old knock-knock jokes to himself and staring at posters of Heather Locklear in her TJ Hooker days.
Although there has been no official confirmation, rumours are circulating around