That's My Boy | Screen | Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh City Paper

That's My Boy

Adam Sandler gleefully hits a bunch of new lows in his R-rated comedy

thatsmyboycolor_25.jpg

In Sean Anders' comedy, hedge-fund manager Todd (Andy Samberg) is getting married at Cape Cod, and the last thing he needs is his oafish estranged dad (Adam Sandler) to show up and ruin things. 

Oh joy. It's a new horrible Adam Sandler movie — now with more vulgarity! Sandler has made a dark art of junior-high PG-13 crassness, but really lets his pants drop for this hard-R-rated comedy. It's a low-rent cornucopia of yuks and yucks, a never-ending stream of profanity, bodily fluids, gross-out nudity, broken taboos, ethnic slurs, fistfights and washed-up celebrities.

But really, all of those are the high points after the film's opening scene, which celebrates a boy being aggressively seduced by his super-buxom math teacher, or what is known in the court system as statutory rape. (This film opening the week of the horrifyingly detailed Jerry Sandusky child-molestation trial? Awesome timing!) 

But Sandler has already foreseen your skeeved-out outrage at his gleeful depiction of this predatory sex act. In the next scene, he mocks the judge (an un-hot older woman, natch) for saying as much, then doubles-down on celebrating the awesomeness of a kid having sex with his teacher, a.k.a. the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I defense. If we had the opposite of a national treasure in popular entertainment, it would be Adam Sandler.