Defence: Adam Sandler is a genius

The news of the release any new Adam Sandler film makes my heart sink. Luckily for me I’m not a professional critic, and therefore it isn’t my job to sit through hours of Sandler's comedy year after year, wondering after nearly two decades when all this is finally going to stop.

What’s even worse for these poor critics is that Sandler is seemingly immune so their so-called power. No matter how much derision is thrown at him, and believe me there’s plenty, year after year Sandler is somehow able to churn out his films with reliable financial success. Just take a look at some of his recent outings; Pixels made $244 million, Blended $124 million, even the sequel to the much hated Grown Ups, the ingeniously titled Grown Ups 2 made a whopping $247 million. If you look at the figures alone, you might wonder why Sandler needs defending at all.

Yet it's only when you actually watch one of Sandler’s that the true horror of his legacy is revealed to you. The reason I hate his films isn’t necesarilly to do with the fact that they are so painfully unfunny that I’d rather shit in my hands and clap than sit through the remaining 60 minutes of Jack and Jill that I refused to watch during an arduous flight back from Istanbul, but rather the message they give off.

All of his characters, or at the least the vast majority of them, not only couldn’t string a decent joke together if a gun was held to their head, but are fundamentally childish slobs who pride themselves on their laziness, misogyny and general ignorance towards the world. And yet these are the heroes of his stories! In true uplifting and inspirational style, Sandler’s characters, quite often surrounded by his other, ridiculous actor mates who he single-handedly keeps in employment, finally get their act together, save the day by solving whichever impossible task the writers have thrown up this time round and end up getting the unrealistically attractive woman (because all women are attracted to slightly overweight, stupid men who are twice their age and have the mentality of a ten year old, right?) all because, at the end of day, Sandler’s character, despite his flaws, is basically an OK guy. Fantastic. Shoot me.

Yet something annoys me more about Sandler than any of his pathetic films combined. That something is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. I was introduced to Punch Drunk Love by film critic Mark Kermode, who had a similar hatred of Sandler’s films and yet time after time found it in himself to forgive him because of this film. I finally watched it and understood Kermode’s standpoint, as in Punch Drunk Love Sandler gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen on film. There. I said it.

The reason Sandler’s performance is so wonderful is that Anderson brings out his best qualities, in that while he is undoubtedly, whether you like him or not, very charismatic, he also has a slightly creepy, manic, unhinged quality to him. If Sandler’s comedic characters were actual human beings, you’d perhaps be charmed by them at a dinner party, but extremely weary of them after a couple glasses of wine in a dark room. Anderson somehow managed to harness this quality, allowing Sandler to create a complex and genuinely multi-layered character, of the likes we’d previously never seen from Sandler and has lead me to the conclusion that while I hate his films, I can’t quite bring myself to hate him as an actor.

Admittedly there have been glimpses of Sandler’s hidden genius since the release of Punch Drunk Love. He was OK in Judd Apatow’s Funny People, Jason Reitman tried to do something interesting with him in his little-seen film Men, Women and Children, and Tom McCarthy attempted to use his good-guy persona in his well-intentioned but critically panned The Cobbler. Yet none of these films have gotten close to the pure genius of Sandler’s performance in Punch Drunk Love. Who knows, maybe this is his intention. Perhaps the real genius of Adam Sandler isn’t this particular performance, but the fact that he refuses to make films like this again. Perhaps, secretly, Sandler is releasing bad film after bad film on purpose, slowly destroying Western civilization as it waits, nay prays, for just one more flash of genius from the man. I suppose only time will tell.