Adam Sandler’s sci‑fi midlife crisis is a hot mess — but I still love it

Image: Sony Pictures/Everett Collection

I’m an unabashed admirer of Adam Sandler. In high school I practically wore out my DVD of Billy Madison, and when Funny People premiered in 2009 I caught it in theaters twice. Sandler’s ragged, boyish comic instincts combined with Judd Apatow’s more reflective sensibility left a lasting impression. Last month I whiled away a Saturday with That’s My Boy on Netflix — and yet, even as a fan, there’s one Sandler vehicle I’ll admit is flat-out terrible, though oddly irresistible to rewatch.

Click arrived at an intriguing moment in Sandler’s career. The early 2000s alternated between his trademark goofball fare — films like Mr. Deeds and Anger Management — and earnest departures such as Punch-Drunk Love and Spanglish. Click sits between those poles: it reaches for emotional weight at times while never abandoning the juvenile gags that are Sandler’s comfort zone.

The film’s premise is more layered than the average Happy Madison production yet straightforward enough to summarize: Michael Newman (Sandler), an overextended architect and family man, discovers a television remote that gives him control over time. Initially he uses it to bypass petty frustrations — traffic jams, awkward arguments with his wife (Kate Beckinsale) — or to rewind their first date to recapture a forgotten song.

Director Frank Coraci (who previously worked with Sandler on The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy) stages much of the movie plainly, often letting Sandler’s instincts drive a scene. The strategy paid off commercially — Click grossed $268.7 million against an $85 million budget — and there are brief flashes of cinematic imagination in how the remote’s powers are visualized. Still, viewers come for Sandler’s crude humor, which makes the film’s increasingly somber second act feel surprising and, at times, discordant.

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Spoiler alert: the plot darkens when Michael’s boss dangles a promotion and then rescinds it. In frustration Michael uses the remote to fast-forward his life until he secures the raise — only to awaken a year later to a fractured marriage and the loss of his dog. The remote, it turns out, develops a will of its own. Christopher Walken plays the enigmatic salesman who peddles the device and is later revealed to have far stranger affiliations. As the remote escalates its interventions, it begins skipping increasingly significant stretches of Michael’s life, pushing him farther into an unknowable future.

Coraci’s vision of the distant future — the film leaps to a version of 2029 — imagines a screen-saturated world and leans on old-fashioned physical comedy (including prosthetic-driven aging) for laughs. The makeup work even earned an Academy Award nomination; Click ultimately lost in that category to Pan’s Labyrinth, but the effort to age Sandler convincingly was notable.

For Sandler, Click felt intimately personal. He had recently entered fatherhood and had endured the loss of his own father — experiences that the film channels into Michael’s emotional arc. The movie interleaves puerile gags with sincere attempts to reckon with the shift from youthful recklessness to middle-aged responsibility, and despite the film’s occasional excesses, the emotional beats in the final act land with surprising force.

There are genuine moments of pathos in Click that caught me off guard in 2006 and read differently in retrospect, especially given Sandler’s later dramatic turn in Uncut Gems. He’s as adept at eliciting empathy as he is at plumbing juvenile humor — and Click is one of his more earnest attempts to reconcile the two.

Click is streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus.

Source: Polygon