Grown Ups 2 (2013)
** (out of 4)
Adam Sandler plays the same character he's been doing since the 1990s and returns to his hometown with his wife (Salma Hayek) and children. Soon his best buds (Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade) decide to throw a party where they all realize that their old age doesn't mean that their lives are over. GROWN UPS 2 is a very bad movie that is so by-the-numbers that it's easy to see why it's making so much money at the box office. I must admit that I've skipped quite a few Sandler movies over the past decade but I've caught the last couple including the original film to this sequel. For the most part people are getting what they pay for, which is cheap, child-like jokes that are aimed at small kids who don't know any better that they're actually watching trash. With that said, the movie is so dumb that I couldn't help but laugh at certain scenes while at the same time being amazed at how amateurish this thing is. I will single out the editing, which is among the worst I've seen in any major motion picture but this might be due to the material itself being so bad that the editor had to struggle to put anything together. What things did I find funny? I must admit that everything with Spade's "son" was pretty funny because of how creepy it actually was. All the jokes aimed at women's breasts is the type of humor kids did when they were ten-years-old but here we see men in their forties doing it. Several famous faces show up along the way including Shaq, Tim Meadows, Jon Lovits, Colin Quinn and Steve Buscemi. As for the "stars" of the picture, it's almost as if all of them are on auto-pilot or at least coming off as if they're on vacation. All of them are decent enough but none of them are giving it their all and just seem to be going through the motions. Still, the target audience of this thing will probably enjoy it while others will need to turn their brains off.
