film | Not even remotely good

In CLICK, two worlds collide: the one where Adam Sandler's a giddy doofus with an inexplicable penchant for parlaying lowbrow humor into box-office gold (Billy Madison, The Waterboy), and the other in which he shirks the expected silly voices and manic antics, gives the legit-actor thing a whirl, and stuns the critics with how terrific he can be when he's alienating his fratboy fan base (Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish). Ergo, Click finds Sandler immersed in the usual glut of jokes centered around farting and humping and titty-jiggling, and then, after it zips decades into the future, he's in sexagenarian make-up for an overblown death sequence, collapsed on a rainy street and gasping in his final throes that "Family [dramatic pause] always comes first." This moment is not punctuated by any belching or flatulence, though I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Click, however, is pretty bad. A peculiar mix of It's a Wonderful Life, Bruce Almighty, A Christmas Carol, Being There, and — depending on how you interpret the dopey "twist" ending — the complete ninth season of Dallas, the movie casts Sandler as a workaholic husband and father of two who stumbles into the Way Beyond section of Bed Bath & Beyond, where a lab coat-clad nutjob (Christopher Walken, doing a Saturday Night Live-ish impression of himself) gives him a universal remote control that allows him to (yep, say it with me) control his universe. Suddenly, he can fast forward through lengthy dinners with his kvetching folks (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner), freeze-frame his asshat boss (David Hasselhoff) long enough to pass gas in his face, and watch the screen-in-screen football game while he's arguing with his wife (Kate Beckinsale). Alas, the remote starts to function on auto-pilot, and soon he's missing his kids growing up, his marriage hitting the skids, his father passing away — all because he wasn't there. But then, he wasn't really ever there, was he? Oooooh.

Click's heavy-handed stabs at pathos don't tug on the heartstrings as much as they yank them across the fingerboard of the world's most out-of-tune violin and proceed to play the Full House theme song for a couple hours. And save for a cute bit that finds Sandler activating his life's own voice-over commentary (by James Earl Jones!), the comedy shtick doesn't stray far from what you expect: rudimentary body-function gags, kicks to the crotch, the family dog repeatedly trying to procreate with a stuffed animal, and Sandler mugging like Jim Carrey Lite as he sets his skin hue to green and growls like the Incredible Hulk. Never explored: what happens when he changes channels, which is mentally what you'll be doing for the duration of Click. D