Today I have brought forth a truly hideous specimen for the purposes of critical review. At first you may feel a strong revulsion to the cinematic abomination that is Jack and Jill. Unfortunately this will only get worse if you watch it but there is something to be learned from everything…even really really really horrible things.

Jack and Jill was marketed as a ‘comedy’ and technically it is possible to laugh at some scenes, but throughout the movie you probably won’t be able to shake the feeling that you’re really watching something from the SAW series or something equally as morbid. However after much discussion with friends (“this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening”) we reached the conclusion that there is more to this movie than what viciously assaults the eyes (with intent to cause grievous harm).

Jack and Jill initially appears to be a bunch of recycled jokes from previous Adam Sandler movies coupled with a range of cobbled together, low brow jokes arranged around the twins Jack (Adam Sandler), basically a mean guy, but considering his position understandably so…till the end of the movie anyway, and Jill (…also Adam Sandler), a revolting, needy, passive-aggressive creature from hell .

Adding to the horror is “an inexplicably committed performance” [Rotten Tomatoes] from none other than Al Pacino, playing a slightly insane, washed out version of himself who manages to fall in love…with Jill…because she isn’t like the regular Hollywood groupies…or something.

Anyway, Jack wants to get Al to do a Dunkin Donuts commercial and he tries to use Al’s…affection… for Jill… to get the commercial to happen, thereby ensuring that he keeps his job as an advertising executive or something such, except that Jill falls for the Jack’s lowly Mexican gardener and Al’s ok with it and that’s it. Or is it?

My theory is that Jack and Jill needs to be considered as part of a body of work. Adam Sandler is no idiot and he has made me genuinely laugh quite a few times, although admittedly a lot of his material is actually fairly low brow comedy but this is the same man who gave an unflinchingly bitter take on the comedy industry itself in 2009’s Funny People and who has shown himself quite capable of tackling relatively more serious performances in Click, Spanglish, Anger Management, and Punch Drunk Love.

A scene from Funny People comes to mind, during which Sandler is watching a movie in which his character, a successful comedian who is diagnosed with cancer, plays a toddler with a full grown adult head. Basically Sandler was mocking that same exaggerated low-brow comedy that appears to be the source of his early success.

Meanwhile back in Jack and Jill, Al Pacino brings Jill over to his swanky bachelor pad for some…seduction…which turns into a game of baseball, during which Jill manages to smash Pacino’s only Oscar award for the movie Scent of a Woman. Amazingly, Pacino reacts with absolute joy, he hates the award! He hates the award more than his fans that would have seen him win it for the Godfather, Serpico, The Godfather II, Dog Day Afternoon, And Justice for All, Scarface, Insomnia, or any other film, except Scent of a Woman…or S1m0ne, which was pretty terrible.

Katie Holmes, who is married to couch trampoline professional, Tom Cruise, plays the superfluous good wife, drawing tragic parallels to her own life. Shaquille O'Neal, holder of a bachelor’s degree in arts, a Masters in Business Administration and a Doctorate in Human Resource Development, makes an extremely degrading cameo…selling ham…whilst wearing what Sandler rightly compares to a Rev Al Sharpton wig.

The still too cool despite a recent string of lackluster movies, Johnny Depp shows up briefly at a basketball game wearing a Justin Bieber t-shirt. There is more evidence however an accurate listing would require me to watch Jack and Jill again and that dear reader goes far beyond the call of duty so I will leave it to you.

Adam Sandler is trying to tell you something with this atrocity of a movie. Maybe Jack and Jill is an indictment against the mass production of comedy and the movie industry and all of its superficial trappings.  Maybe its message is the same as what your cat is trying to tell you when it leaves a dead mouse under the rug. I leave it to you brave readers…watch at your own peril and beware the predictably drawn out fart joke in the third act.

 

Genre: Horror, Psychological Drama, Tragedy.

Rating: Negative 5

 

 

 

 

 

(Reviewed by Channa Fernanopulle)