The Week Of

After a strong and sweetly funny start, Adam Sandler’s latest falls apart in its second half, a stretch of film time that sorely needed some fine tuning. Sandler plays Kenny, a dad whose daughter (Allison Strong) is getting married in a week. He sees it as his last chance to do something for her, so he tries his best to put together an impressive spread for the two families coming together. Chris Rock plays the father of the groom, a wealthy heart surgeon who isn’t impressed with the hotel Kenny has picked. Others on hand include Rachel Dratch—good to see her—as Kenny’s wife, and Steve Buscemi as a sleazy family member with amazing climbing abilities. Directed by Robert Smigel, the film goes on long enough for the jokes to start dying from old age. A joke involving a legless uncle starts funny, gets funnier, almost gets really funny, then goes stale. As a Howard Stern fan, I was happy to finally see the culmination of all of Ronnie the Limo Driver’s hard work; he’s a bad actor, but he was better than I thought he would be. (He’s a convincing sleeper.) Having grown up on Long Island, I can say that the movie did a good job capturing the region, from the accents to the undying loyalty to Billy Joel. You have to have some respect for a comedy that kills a legless man by throwing him into a bounce pit in the middle of a strip club, but that’s not enough to make it a winner. That’s a shame, because Sandler is actually pretty endearing in it, and some of the performers bring at least their B-game. It needed to be about 25 minutes shorter, and 35 percent funnier. (Streaming on Netflix.)