In some of the least shocking movie news of 2013, critics absolutely hate Adam Sandler’s latest comedy, Grown Ups 2. The 2010 original wasn’t exactly beloved, earning a 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a 30 out of 100 on Metacritic. But it also earned $271 million at the international box office, making a sequel inevitable. So far, Grown Ups 2 isn’t even living up to the low bar set by the original, with the current Rotten Tomatoes rank currently hovering at 7 percent, and a Metacritic score of only 20/100. Much of the venom is directed at the film’s low-brow scatological humor and female objectification, as well the waste of talent from the film’s many SNL-alum stars. (And the lack of excuses made for the disappearance of Rob Schneider.) The film’s highest praises and lowest insults after the jump:
Of course, there are a few people who somewhat enjoyed the film. Adam Graham in The Detroit News backhandedly praised it for being “a simple film for complicated times. Friendship, family and breasts: Sometimes that’s all you need” (while still acknowledging that “Sandler and his friends are bloated millionaires who have long been asleep at the wheel creatively.”) Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, who kind of liked the original, calls it “a decisively funnier movie than the first Grown Ups” and insists that his comparison to the Jackass movies is a compliment. Christopher Campbell at Film School Rejects makes a point of saying he didn’t dislike the movie, but awesomely refers to it as “a pretty weird movie, like an aimless Simpsons episode filled with all the colorful ensemble but without any of the cleverness, and Homer as the smartest guy in Springfield.”
Most came down decidedly on the other side of the equation. Stephanie Merry of The Washington Post says the movie “seems to actually drain IQ points from its viewers while wasting a talented cast.” Claudia Puig at USA Today explains that “the movie manages to emerge plot-free. Instead, it offers a succession of humorless gross-out gags, fat jokes, suggestive posturing, bullying, belches and pratfalls.” John DeFore at The Hollywood Reporter points out that this is Sandler has never before made a sequel. “That he would make an exception for Grown Ups says nothing good about his trajectory as an artist – at this point, even combining those five words may provoke snickers.” Mick LaSalle at The San Francisco Chronicle notes that “it stalls on a series of half-gags, almost gags and gags aborted midway because they didn’t turn out to be funny […] notice how many scenes are cut off right in the middle, because the joke never flowered.” And Andrew Barker in Variety calls it ”[a]mong the slackest, laziest, least movie-like movies released by a major studio in the last decade. Grown Ups 2 is perhaps the closest Hollywood has yet come to making ‘Ow! My Balls!’ seem like a plausible future project.”
