Blended is the third collaboration romantic comedy film with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore and isn't anything special at all. The story revolves around two single parents played by Sandler and Barrymore as they experience a bad blind date and decide to go their separate ways until they end up on a trip to Africa on a blended family resort where the focus is family bonding. As you would expect this film revolves around the fact that Jim (Sandler) begins to teach Lauren's (Barrymore) boys how to embrace their manhood and teach them lessons that their mother wasn't able to do and vice versa, Lauren teaches Jim's daughters how to be more feminine. I think we have all seen enough rom coms to know where this film will end up.
For a film based in Africa you don't really see much of Africa at all, rather you see the holiday vegas style resort which means the film shys away from showing many scenes that take place in the African wilderness. This movie had the potential to be great as it built up many emotional moments only to take you out of the moment by showing silly jokes like two rhinos having sex which is a shame because if they focused on the emotional side of the relationships between the characters the movie would have been a better watch as opposed to a typical cookie cutter rom com. From the rom com aspect Sandler and Barrymore do a great job and still have the chemistry they had back in The Wedding Singer but everything else in the movie just weighs that down.
This movie literally does nothing to break away from the generic rom com formula and follow all the typical tropes of rom comes by the formula which means that you can pretty much guess how the whole movie will play out. This is all the way down to the fact that Jim likes Lauren but is too afraid to dive into the relationship because of his deceased spouse but eventually decides to test the waters. That is one of many typical tropes that this movie fails to do uniquely. The children of Jim and Lauren do an ok job but they don't really have their characters built up or developed at all besides a few interactions with the opposing family. I will say that one of the funnier moments in the film was when Jim's eldest daughter comes down after her makeover and pans to different characters as their reactions are played out my popular songs, a joke which referenced again later in the film with greater effect but other than this joke others just weren't as memorable.
The supporting cast in this film was actually pretty good but they didn't really stand out much at all. Terry Crews was good at doing what he does best, making us laugh with everything he has, even Shaquille O'Niel was good and it was a shame that we got to see so little of him in the movie. But like I have mentioned the whole movie is weighed down by the stereotypical tropes which really hinder the movie, even certain characters do this such as Joel McHale's character who is the typical douchebag character. One character which really annoyed me in the film was one of Jim's daughters who sees her dead mother and refuses to let go, the reason this annoyed me was because it seemed so forced from a comedy and drama aspect and I could see from a mile away that this not letting go of the past would play into Jim eventually confessing his love to Lauren.
Overall this movie is an entertaining watch if you have nothing else to do, but it isn't really worth going out of your way to see unless you really want to watch a cheesy, stereotypical rom com. To be honest I didn't expect much from this movie since Sandler hasn't really made anything great lately that I remember so I wasn't let down or blown away by this movie at all. If anything this movie was an under developed stereotypical mess which shot itself in the foot by robbing the movie of many emotional moments which would have made the movie greater than it was.
This movie gets 2 Adam Sandler heads out of 5. The movie isn't anything special and that is apparent from the get go but if you really want to watch a cheesy sitcom joke ridden rom com or if you are extremely bored check this movie out when it comes to DVD. I wouldn't advise wasting money to catch this on the big screen, save your money for a better film. Here are some other romantic comedies in the same vein as Blended if you have the itch for something similar.
Review Written by Armour Dude
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