FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

Michael Newman is always in a race to stay afloat. He scrambles to finish his architectural design concepts, because he’s been promised time after time that this next one will land him a position as partner. He tries to make time for his wife and kids, but somehow his demanding work schedule doesn’t seem to want that to happen. He has to juggle an upcoming July 4th outing with the family and a massive new account guaranteeing the promotion with a successful design and presentation. To make matters worse, the neighbors are always flaunting all their new toys. Well, Michael decides to get a toy of his own, a universal remote that controls everything. Little does he know that when they say everything, they mean everything.

In case you haven’t seen an ad, or if you couldn’t guess it already, the remote controls everything within Michael’s universe, and he’s the only one that knows it. He can rewind to watch events that occurred in the past. He can make everyone speak in a different language, use picture-in-picture. He can go to his main menu and listen to the audio commentary on his life (which is really just action description). But most importantly for the sake of the plot, he can fast forward through all the boring stuff like traffic. Sounds pretty cool, but the movie misses out on the key aspect of the fantasy of being able to control your life through a remote. Everyone wants the ability to manipulate time, but you want it to suit your purpose. Why would you fast forward the tough parts? It doesn’t make your life easier or less stressful, it just makes it so that you don’t remember the stress because you put your body on auto-pilot. Wouldn’t it be better and more efficient to pause life and then do what you need to do? What’s worse is that they establish that he can pause everything around him. That’s the first thing he does with the remote. Did he forget that he can do that? There’s also a slow motion feature for crying out loud.

Here’s what the movie should be. Michael pauses life to get everything accomplished that he needs to, but the catch is that he keeps aging while surrounding life is stopped. Enh, what do I know? That probably wouldn’t work either, but at least it would make more sense. No matter what, the plot sounds downright hilarious, doesn’t it? A big reason why the movie fails to live up the standards of Sandler’s earlier work (such as “Billy Madison” which is referenced in this movie) is that there are far too many sentimental moments. It’s less about making jokes related to the almighty clicker and more about the repercussions of missing out on so much of his life. If the emotional content were pulled off a little better, you might even have a straight up drama on your hands for the entire second half of the picture. There’s so much that could have been played with just in having him skip forward to the future. The changes in the family dynamic and with their appearances were not enough to make it work.

That’s not to say “Click” didn’t have its moments. Lowbrow humor saves the day as once again we see proof that a dog humping something (in this case a giant stuffed duck) is comedic gold. The best moment, however, is totally unrelated to the plot or storyline. Michael is stopped in rush hour traffic and this car drives up next to him and this nerdy but buff looking black man (played by an uncredited Terry Crews – “Everybody Hates Chris” & “Battle Dome”) starts singing and dancing along with his radio, performing strictly for and at Sandler’s character. It comes out of left field (but I don’t think mentioning it here will ruin the full impact when you see it on the screen), and we don’t see the guy again, which makes it so great. I want to see a movie about that guy. That HAS to be interesting.

Ultimately, the film seems to be trying to regain some of Sandler’s past glory and recapture a little bit of the same atmosphere from his mid 1990s work. But without Tim Herlihy writing (instead we get two guys who should know better in Steve Koren – “Saturday Night Live” and “Seinfeld” & Mark O’Keefe “The Late Show with David Letterman” and “NewsRadio”), and by slathering on the sentimental adult with a family stuff, it has no shot. It may be good for a few laughs, but you can’t rely on Christopher Walken to get you out of jams, and the last half seemed to completely neglect the whole humor part altogether. The story’s relatively interesting, but far from what you’d expect, and probably from what it should have been. Feel free to fast-forward this one.

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