The One Who Stands/Stands for Success Even in frankly difficult years for his career, the famous American comedian Adam Sandler does not cease to be discouraged. Once each of his films achieved the widest distribution around the world, broke through to the top of the box office and allowed the actor without any problems to put on the account of $ 20 million. Having no competitors in the chosen field of activity, Sandler deftly bypassed clashes with Jim Carrey, Steve Carell and other comedians, firmly securing the position of a high-aged bully, who eventually moved to the league of family traditions. However, the more Adam Sandler films appeared at the box office, the more similar they became. The actor and part-time producer refused to attract fresh faces to the shooting, trying to work exclusively with proven directors and screenwriters, because of which the secondary nature of the production began to increase from film to film. Of course, among the dozen openly passing works of Sandler periodically came across really good, but the trend has already begun to gain momentum and without a radical change in the rules of the game, Adam is not destined to escape from the trap that he sculpted with his own hands. A series of box office failures seriously undermined Sandler’s confidence in himself, and yet he still found a way out of the situation, signing a lucrative contract with Netflix, the online giant of video entertainment, investing serious money in every project being developed.
Sensing an unprecedented surge of strength from the opportunities, Sandler quickly gathered around him a team of loyal henchmen, including Rob Schneider and Nick Swardson, to stage a parody western “The Ridiculous Six”, whose artistic performance was predetermined even before the work began, but the public accepted the picture quite favorably, providing Netflix with a solid profit on subscription. Further picture of Sandler, “Everything new”, was already much better and more entertaining, there was intrigue in it, and the level of outright stupidity decreased to an acceptable limit. Fans of the comedian were inspired, albeit small, but the success of his idol and began to wait for his next move, made as before under the auspices of Netflix. Sandler himself, after another round of cooperation with Steven Brill in “Everything new”, entrusted him with the work on “Sandy Wexler”, not quite a typical comedy, similar in components to a slightly crazy melodrama. As you would expect, the project again got Rob Schneider, Terry Crews, Kevin James and many other constant regulars of the second plan, playing for Sandler hilarious situations with a sweetness of absolute absurdity. Was no exception and “Sandy Wexler”, rushing from the extreme of a love relationship in a typical comedy with Adam Sandler with excessively prolonged timekeeping, which proved to be an unbearable burden for those who expected an easy, unobtrusive film without boring morality and endless red tape of predictable moments.
So, the plot of the film introduces us to Sandy Wexler (Sandler) of the sample of the 90s. Living in Los Angeles, our hero could not pass by show business, and even if he did not conquer the profession of an artist, he became a rather successful manager, helping talent to achieve the desired heights. The style of Sandy Wexler’s work is nothing but eccentric, since under his care he takes only strange guys with whom other managers do not want to work. But this approach pays off, as Sandy somehow unfathomably sees the hidden virtues of people, trusts them, invests money, and then collects fully deserved interest. Not knowing the bitter failures and defeats, the manager considers himself a spoiler of fate, not putting his nose too high, but even such a luminary of show business as Sandy Wexler will have to face unforeseen circumstances that shot him right in the heart. Noticing the very promising singer Courtney Clark (Jennifer Hudson), Sandy suddenly realized that fate had serious plans for both of them. Unable to resist gravity, the hero does everything possible to get closer to Courtney, but their relationship, as you would expect, will certainly not be typical, and the story itself will stretch for quite a long time, demonstrating changes in characters, culture and show business itself.
Periodically, Adam Sandler tries to conduct creative experiments, trying to get out of the ossified role and show the public that his dramatic talent has not yet died out. Relatively recently, Sandler took part in The Shoemaker, which did not laugh at all, but provoked complex reflections through dubious artistic methods, similar to outright speculation with emotions, and now Sandy Wexler stood in line. Unlike “The Shoemaker”, in which Sandler’s company was only one longtime friend, Steve Buscemi, in “Sandy Wexler” there is a whole landing of the good old team, automatically guaranteeing a huge number of stupid and not very jokes that will complicate the process of creating a full-fledged melodrama with rare interspers of charming humor. Sandler and director Steven Brill clearly wanted to do something different than their previous work together, but they only got it halfway. The story for a long time tries to seem meaningful, diligent, perhaps too accurate, but at some points it is literally torn apart by a crazy explosion involving Schneider, James and other comedians, in connection with which you do not know whether to laugh or cry. Such emotional jumps lead to a very difficult perception of a story focused on love, but at the same time sliding into not the best clowning.
But the biggest problem of the film is not its self-determination, and in the unacceptably prolonged action that exceeded the bar in two hours of screen time. Neither comedy nor melodrama have the right to groundlessly cross such boundaries, since with such significant time intervals, the dynamics of what is happening significantly decreases, the viewer becomes bored and he wants to look at the clock more and more often. The storyline of “Sandy Wexler” could be safely placed in an hour and a half with the credits, and then even the most controversial moments of the production would have acquired energy, not badly amused and the overall impression of the film was much higher than average. However, the creators felt that Netflix subscribers needed to be given more than they wanted, and this was wrong. Instead of comedy or melodrama in our hands was a rather sluggish spectacle, to watch until the very end is not as easy as it seems. And only periodically appearing celebrities, among which even “Weird Al” Yankovic languished, allows you to brighten up the existing dramatic mediocrity caused by Sandler’s desire to conduct another experiment and give viewers extra minutes of bonus viewing, which nobody really needs.
In the end, Sandy Wexler has mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is always nice to see familiar actors who prefer to play in a team rather than separately, but on the other hand, the story looks slow, too heavy and rashly stretched. This is not the worst film in Adam Sandler’s long career, but it will also not be ranked as the best. “Sandy Wexler” turned out to be controversial and it is difficult to recommend it for unambiguous viewing.
5 out of 10