Leave it to Adam Sandler and his band of merry men to take what could have been an interesting concept and turn it into an excuse to make dick and fart jokes (literally dick and fart jokes and more than a few sex jokes as well). By making this into as broad a comedy as possible, they turn Click into nothing more than another high concept comedy in which the world contorts itself around in increasing unbelievable ways at the inconvenience of countless other people just so some privileged white guy (usually an architect) can learn to appreciate his life (that is already far better than 99 percent of the rest of the people on the planet). Huzzah.
It’s the same plot that we’ve seen in Sandler’s own Spanglish as well as Bruce Almighty and the recent Breaking and Entering. I guess it’s easier to just make a film like countless others (especially if it’s a proven money maker) but it sucks when they take what could have been a good concept for a serious minded movie and run it straight into the ground.
The most egregious error the filmmakers indulge in here is in making the universal remote ruin Michael’s life in a completely nonsensical and ridiculous way. They have to have things go wrong, of course, since this is that sort of film, but the way they do it is just silly. It involves the remote learning Michael’s “preferences” and then fast forwarding through every future occurrence of something he’s fast forwarded through once (fights with his wife and showers, for instance). Eventually he’s skipping so much of his life that he’s very near the end of it.
The problem with all that, besides the obvious fact that remotes don’t learn preferences and that, even if they did, there would have to be some sort of override control, is that it makes the device the scapegoat. Sure it’s reflecting Michael’s initial choices but after that he’s fighting the remote the whole time. Thus, when Michael is given a second chance at the end of the film (in that tired cop out to end all cop outs: it was all a dream), he really hadn’t changed all that much. Rather than learning to appreciate the little things in life, it’s far more believable that he would just have learned to distrust creepy men with strange haircuts who talk like Christopher Walken.
Add to this nonsense the fact that Michael is, for some reason, a huge dick to a neighbor’s kid (named O’Doyle in a reference to Sandler’s earlier and much funnier though no less puerile Billy Madison) and you get a very disturbing portrait of the man Sandler is playing here. This despite the fact that he’s certainly become aware of his critics’ descriptions of his man-child characters as monsters (witness his attempt to rehab his image in Spanglish and Reign Over Me). He and his band of cohorts are just not smart enough to realize that making Michael a “family man” does not absolve him of his sins. That’s far too subtle a concept to grasp for these Neanderthals. And as long as the filmgoing public at large doesn’t catch on anytime soon, I guess we’ll be stuck with an endless parade of these grinning assholes like Michael. Once again, huzzah.
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