Movies & TV

By Mick LaSalle

July 12, 2013

Grown Ups 2

Comedy. Starring Adam Sandler, Salma Hayek, Kevin James and Chris Rock. Directed by Dennis Dugan. (PG-13. 101 minutes.)

"Grown Ups 2" isn't repugnant, obnoxious or painful to experience. This would not seem necessary to say, and under normal circumstances, that could hardly be construed as praise, except that recently the bad movies haven't only been bad. They've actually hurt to watch.

Indeed, if you scooped up someone from 500 years ago, some poor soul not inured to entertainment as a form of abuse, and made the unlucky victim sit through either "The Lone Ranger" or "Pacific Rim," he'd probably go mad and never recover. Thus the bar gets lowered, and the temptation arises to say something nice about "Grown Ups 2" just because it doesn't cause injury. But no, it's a bad movie, too, just old-school bad, the kind that's merely lousy and not an occasion for migraines or night sweats.

It has five good minutes, and they're right at the beginning. Lenny - that is, Adam Sandler - is a married man who opens his eyes one morning and finds a huge deer standing by his bed. Lenny's wife (Salma Hayek) screams, and the deer, startled, rears up and urinates in Lenny's face.

This is worth mentioning for two reasons, first to establish, right off, that "Grown Ups 2" was not based on a Noel Coward play; and second, just to put it out there that a urinating deer joke is perfectly OK - and even to be celebrated - so long as it's funny. People go to "Grown Ups 2" for good, well-timed urinating-deer humor, and I, for one, am all for it. So the problem here isn't in the nature of this movie's humor, but rather in the failure of it.

After the deer, it's all downhill, though it takes a little while to figure that out. Characters are introduced - two other couples, played by Maria Bello and Kevin James and by Chris Rock and Maya Rudolph, respectively. The introductions are pleasant enough. But then, just as the mechanism is in place for the movie to get started, it stalls on a series of half-gags, almost gags and gags aborted midway because they didn't turn out to be funny. If you ever have the mild misfortune of seeing this movie - say, you're on an airplane, and it's either this or the in-flight magazine - notice how many scenes are cut off right in the middle, because the joke never flowered.

Of course, the conscientious thing to do in that situation would have been to jettison the gag and write a better one, but why do that if you can just lean on the talented cast to create an atmosphere of funny where funny doesn't otherwise exist?

I feel the pull, too. To see Sandler here in his appealing straight-man mode, or Chris Rock, who just shows up and you expect to laugh, or Hayek, who is a lively and appealing comic actress, is to get ready and stay ready for a good time.

Forget it. It's not coming. You might as well sit there and expect Godot to turn up. In "Grown Ups 2" the audience waits in vain.

Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle's movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com