The one actor who spent their career infuriating Roger Ebert: “It’s not just sad, it’s brutal”
It’s always annoying when you see a talented actor wasting their career in a never-ending sea of shoddy movies, especially when they inevitably star in an all-too-rare reminder of what they could have been. It was an existential crisis that plagued Roger Ebert for years, with one actor smack-dab in the centre.
If an actor makes a lot of bad films, then they might just be a bad actor. However, Ebert had the sneaking suspicion, which was and has been proven correct on several occasions, that if they stopped wasting their talents in an ocean of forgettable and formulaic nonsense, they had something special to offer.
What made it worse was that the critic had met the offender in person several times and found them to be a stand-up guy. And yet, he was constantly biting his tongue and trying everything in his power to refrain from asking why on earth they were so happy to slum it through so many risible features.
As far back as 1998, he laid his cards on the table. “Do I have something visceral against Adam Sandler? I hope not,” Ebert opined while giving The Waterboy a one-star review. “I try to keep an open mind and approach every movie with high hopes. It would give me enormous satisfaction (and relief) to like him in a movie.”
That wouldn’t happen until he assessed his seventh Sandler-starring flick, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, with the preceding six earning an average star rating of 1.5. “I’ve met Adam Sandler a couple of times, and he’s a nice guy, smart and personable,” Ebert reasoned, making it clear that he didn’t have a personal vendetta against the Happy Madison mogul.
“What I cannot understand,” he added. “Is why he has devoted his career to finding new kinds of obnoxious voices, and the characters to go along with them.” When he gave a standout performance in Punch-Drunk Love, a pertinent question was asked: “He can’t go on making those moronic comedies forever, can he?”
Unfortunately, Ebert would get his answer soon enough. Anger Management? “Everything about the way the movie goes wrong indicates a product from the Sandler assembly line.” Click? “It’s not just sad, it’s brutal.” Just Go With It? “Adam Sandler stays well within the range of polite, ingratiating small-talk artists he unnecessarily limits himself to.” Bedtime Stories? “Not my cup of tea.”
It’s telling that Ebert’s best-reviewed Sandler vehicle was Judd Apatow’s Funny People, which saw him place his usual schtick to one side for a picture that “contains an entirely different actor than the one we’re familiar with.” He wanted to like him, and he had nothing against him personally; he just wished that he’d stop wasting his time, effort, and peak years in so many woeful movies.
It’s unfortunate that Ebert passed away in 2013, since he never got the chance to see Sandler’s work in Uncut Gems, Jay Kelly, Spaceman, or Hustle, which went a long way to remedying every single issue he’d had with the first three decades of his filmography.
