Rent Blended (2014)

Blended review by George Hooper - Cinema Paradiso

It’s been a while since Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore starred in a film together, the last being 50 First Dates, an entertaining if flawed little rom com that managed to use both of the stars charisma to work its way past some stale jokes and a premise that lacked muster but Blended tries the same trick and fails. Not only do Sandler and Barrymore look bored for most of the film but they actually reuse jokes from the afformentioned movie, jokes that didn’t work then either.

Blended follows Jim (Sandler) and Lauren (Barrymore), two people who meet on a blind date and have one of the worst dating experiences of their lives and think they have seen the last of each other. However when they are stuck together on a family holiday they find new sides to each other and the lives they live with their kids as they start to improve their kids lives without even realising it.

Sandler has always been one for making a fool out of himself for the sake of physical comedy but somehow he has taken it to a whole other level for this one, pulling out all the stops and going so far over the top its almost unbearable. Sure watching a former comic star fall flat after a career of hits is sometimes fun but this time around when the decline has been so slow and constant it almost seems like someone should take the poor man out back like a wounded horse and shoot him.

In the end Blended is just like any other Sandler vehicle. It’s loud, its crude and it doesn’t possess even an ounce of subtlety to boot and while the luminous Barrymore usually helps things stay on track she is equally enamoured by the idea of going all out that she too phones it in. All in all, Blended is the worst kind of romantic comedy, it avoids any semblance of romance in favour of a few cheap laughs and then reneges on the jokes too leaving you with a big pile of nothing, which ironically makes you feel just as cheap.