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First Posted: 5/20/2014 These days, Adam Sandler is a bottle of beer that&#8217;s lost all its bubbles &#8212; cheap, mass produced domestic beer.
So let&#8217;s focus on what works in his latest, &#8220;Blended,&#8221; because he sure doesn&#8217;t.
Drew Barrymore, in her third pairing with Sandler, still brings energy and conviction to her performance as Lauren, a mother of two thrown together on an African vacation with this lump she met on the Blind Date from Hell &#8212; a blind date at Hooters.
Wendi McClendon-Covey, playing her best friend Jen, delivers a comically furious turn and either upstages Barrymore or forces Drew to play at her level. Watch and listen to the two of them berate an obnoxious, snarky loser-dad at Lauren&#8217;s son&#8217;s Little League game &#8212; shouting, talking over each other, name-calling. It&#8217;s Vince-and-Owen-in-&#8220;Wedding Crashers&#8221; good.
Then there&#8217;s Terry Crews, who steals the movie as the MC and singer of an African vocal group at the Sun City resort where Jim (Sandler), the sad sporting-goods salesman, and Lauren, the professional closet organizer, and their five children end up in an absurdly contrived joint vacation/safari.
The wild-eyed Crews, dancing and crooning, bumping and grinding, sings of the &#8220;blending&#8221; that will go on during this week of non-traditional families wildlife watching and bonding. He is the Greek chorus for this obvious, stale and stiff comedy, a shirtless jolt of life (the man&#8217;s pecs do a dance all their own) in this lesser entry in the career of the aptly nicknamed &#8220;Sandman.&#8221;
We are deep into the &#8220;family-comedy&#8221; stage of Sandler&#8217;s working life, families where the kids cuss and rhinos hump, where Jim urinating long and loudly outside of a tent is played for a laugh, where the past-expiration-date Kevin Nealon and a jiggly/funny Jessica Lowe (the new Anna Faris?) are the oversexed other &#8220;non-traditional family&#8221; that the Lauren-Jim ensemble pair up with.
Jim is raising three emotionally stunted daughters to be pseudo-jocks, like himself. Who nicknames his daughter Hilary (Bella Thorne) &#8220;Larry&#8221;? Who would name his troubled middle daughter (Emma Fuhrmann), the one who &#8220;still talks to (dead) Mom,&#8221; Espn?
Maybe the sort of guy who peoples his movies with jocks (Shaq) and jockcasters (Dan Patrick) in cameos, along with other washed-up comics of his generation.
Jim&#8217;s a widower, meant to explain Sandler&#8217;s sleepwalking demeanor. His daughters need a mom.
Lauren is newly divorced, with a maddeningly rude and hormonal teen (Braxton Beckham) and tantrum-tossing tween (Kyle Red Silverstein), both of whom need a father figure, since their dad (Joel McHale) is a no-show.
Every set-up is an eye-roller. Jim and Lauren stumble into each other at the drug store. He&#8217;s cluelessly buying tampons for his teen, she&#8217;s replacing a porn mag she ripped up for her teen.
Gags and one-liners that would be discarded in a better comedy are trotted out and then underlined here. When Lauren gives the tomboy &#8220;Larry&#8221; a girlish makeover, she debuts hearing &#8220;I&#8217;m Every Woman&#8221; in her head, her possible new beau hears &#8220;I&#8217;ll Make Love to You&#8221; while her dad panics and hears &#8220;It&#8217;s the End of the World, and We Know It.&#8221; Hilarious. Let&#8217;s repeat that musical joke, shall we? They do.
The African scenes include digital ostrich riding and a digital monkey band performing &#8220;Careless Whisper.&#8221;
And in the middle of it all is Sandler, aimlessly going through the motions, a character others dismiss as &#8220;a buffoon,&#8221; &#8220;a chubby loser&#8221; in need of a fist-bump. Even Barrymore, who has gotten rich on &#8220;The Wedding Singer&#8221; and &#8220;50 First Dates,&#8221; has a hard time giving him one in this flat-beer farce.

Sandler’s too stale to be ‘Blended’ with anybody