Part of me thinks this movie was written on-the-fly, get a bunch of funny, comedic, actors in the cast (Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider), and just roll the cameras and let the magic happen. And for the most part, the film delivered. 5 boys from the late 1970s come back together when their youth basketball coach passes away and they all attend the funeral. Much of the humor is of the needling kind where each character is made fun of by the rest of the gang, but underneath it all, there's a lot of heart and affection between the members of this former youth basketball team, and their growing families, who all enjoy a weekend at their favorite youth retreat as they prepare to tend to their deceased coach's ashes.
Overall, most of the humor is funny (there's a lot of the over-40 jokes, the generational jokes, confrontational jokes amongst their youth basketball rivals, wife jokes, kids jokes, etc), and the pacing is good. So I enjoyed most of it, though I think Chris Rock's character sort of got the short-shrift, but his character's family had some funny moment. Was the humor cutting-edge? No, but I think it delivered on its marketed premise.
I give it 2.75 stars, or a grade of B-.
No comments:
Post a Comment