Adam Sandler is back, and he’s more retarded than ever! Well, I’m saying this, but I’m a big fan, so what does that make me, ey? On TV in Saturday Night Live, on his comedy albums, and in a series of dumb and dumber movies, Sandler always makes me laugh hard. His work is not the smartest or the wittiest or anything, but there’s a certain quality to it… A juvenile vitality that just makes it irresistible, to me at least. Sandler’s movies can be quite crude and offensive, but they’re never really mean. You sense that at heart, Adam’s a big softie. Beyond the intense schooling, heavy golfing, Cajun football, wedding singing and inane fathering, his movies all end up being sweet little love stories about losers getting the girl. Maybe that explains why geeky teenage boys like the Great Sandoo so much. That and the retarded humor!

You also gotta dig how independent Sandler gets to be through his work making big Hollywood movies. He’s involved in the writing of almost all his movies, he usually has an old college buddy directing and there’s a posse of familiar faces that keep showing up again here and there. Like Jon Lovitz, who has a cameo here as a peeping Tom, Rob Schneider, back as the “You can do it!” guy, or Carl Weathers, returning from the dead as Happy Gilmore’s one-handed mentor. So basically, each new movie is kind of the same old shtick, only in a new setting. This time out, it’s hell, with no other than Harvey Keitel as the Devil! The plot’s about how after a 10 000 year reign as the Prince of Darkness (having succeeded to Rodney Dangerfield‘s Grandpa Satan!), the Devil has to choose an heir between his three sons, the cruel Adrian (Rhys Ifans), the insane Cassius (Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister Jr.), and… Nicky (Sandler), the gentler, much abused little brother with a grimacing face and a speech impediment. Lucifer figures out he’s better off staying on the throne a few more centuries, but Adrian and Cassius certainly aren’t happy about that decision, so they freeze the gates of Hell and go up on earth to corrupt humanity and create their own Hell…

Huh!?! Don’t ask, it hardly matters. It just happens to be the reason why Nicky is sent on earth; he has to capture his evil bros and bring them back down or his father will decompose and the balance of good and evil in the world will be all messed up. Huh again. Okay, so right there already, this sounds like a pretty retarded flick, which it is! It’s sort of like a dumbed down “Dogma”, a wacky ensemble comedy featuring a talking bulldog, some big hairy monsters, Ozzy Osbourne, some ghoul with breasts on his head (Kevin Nealon), an effete actor (Allen Covert, from every Sandler movie), a repulsive cross-dresser, Henry “the Fonz” Winkler, a blind preacher (Quentin Tarantino), two dopey metal heads and a bunch of heavenly cute Valley angels led by the radiant Reese Witherspoon. There’s a lot of fish-out-water jokes, mucho cheesy special effects and, of course, a sweet little love story between Nicky and Patricia Arquette, almost unrecognisable with ugly hair and big glasses. There’s a whole lot of goofiness, some hilarious, some just stupid, but one thing the movie never gets is boring. At a brisk 90 minutes, this is one of these feather weight dumb little movies that aren’t memorable but that are fun while you’re watching them. This is one of Sandler’s lesser films, but fans will dig it nonetheless. I did.