The latest Adam Sandler vehicle which features Sandler playing Jack Sadelstein and his twin sister Jill. Jack, a family man, each year dreads the visit of his over bearing and annoying sister during thanksgiving especially when she refuses to leave. Also starring Katie Holmes and Al Pacino and directed by Dennis Dugan.
This movie made me laugh. I wasn’t expecting it to, I was honestly dreading watching this film mainly because I loathe movies where a stand out comedian needs to dress in drag to pull laughs, in a sense it seems worse than selling out, its more like selling short. However, this film was written really well. Adam Sandler effectively plays two personalities that are strikingly different and you begin to follow them individually. Jill becomes a very likeable character as you become acquainted with the lonely and kind hearted nature she has been constructed from.
Twins fascinate me. One of the best parts about this film is that they spliced in footage of real life twins speaking about their lives, one set of twins mentioned that you end up hating aspects of your twin because you can really see them in yourself. I believe that is what this film was presenting. A man who puts all his faults and frustrations of the holidays on his twin sister even though everyone around her can’t help but adore her eccentricities. There were the usual Happy Madison (Adam Sandler’s production team) suspects including Allen Covert playing a homeless man. It felt like a Happy Madison film and wasn’t actually trying as hard as I expected it to.
I laughed out loud in a few scenes which means that this film as a comedy was successful in it’s execution, do not however expect it to be anything other than a silly situation comedy, it is not without it’s charm. It only subjected us to toilet humour a couple of times and the rest of it was a mix of slapsticks and well timed gags. Al Pacino was crazy, I’m not going to say much more but when he is in a film playing himself and he has free reign to freak out as many people he can, he does it with style. I really enjoyed watching him make fun of himself, we all take him far too seriously and I realized that was why he is doing this movie not because he needs a buck, because lets face it Al Pacino doesn’t need to work, he’s king.
As I said before the best part about the film was the spliced in interviews with real twins, talking about their secret languages and hand shakes, their dislikes and ultimately how they cant live without each other because they will always be connected. Once you realize this the film has a lot of heart and was actually quite pleasant, it turned out to be no where near the silly cheap gag cross dressing frolic I expected it to be. Well done.
I give Jack and Jill 3 and a half stars out of 5