Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights

Review by Jason Donner

I'm not sure if I can gather the appropriate words for the following review, but let's see if I can make at least a gallant effort.

Ahem.

Adam Sandler... he's back and he's a cartoon character. Not only is he a cartoon character, but he's the proverbial "Jew who stole Christmas." Y'see, in his latest opus, Eight Crazy Nights, Sandler plays Davey, a 33 year old sociopath who hates Christmas, Hanukah, everyone, and himself. Generally, he's not a pleasant fellow to be sure, but after one particularly psychotic episode and musical number (it's a musical, by the way), he finds himself in front of a judge and seconds away from having to serve prison time.

That is until a diminutive white-haired old man named Whitey steps in and offers the chance for Davey to serve parole coaching little league basketball. A battle of wits (or lack of) ensues, there's poop jokes, fart jokes, general immature humor, and then it's all topped off with a horsecrap happy ending that somehow affirms the holiday spirit.

As you can probably guess, I was not terribly impressed with this movie. You have to realize, of course, that I am one of Adam Sandler's biggest defenders... I sneered in the faces of everyone who hated Happy Gilmore, and defied those who panned Big Daddy, but lately, Sandler's body of work has gone from enjoyable, to tolerable, to down right horrible and Eight Crazy Nights is on the bottom rung of the Sandler ladder-o-crap.

Not only is this movie unfunny, not only does it try to be a big animated musical like South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut and fail miserably, and not only is it just pointless and fake as the snow on a K-Mart Christmas tree, but the whole thing smacks of vanity. It's almost as if Adam Sandler burst into the Columbia offices one day and said, "Hey guys, I want to be in a cartoon and do all the voices! Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy play fifteen characters a movie, why can't I?"

Hey, if you don't believe this movie was done to stroke Adam Sandler's vanity, check out how buff the animators made him in the basketball sequence and then tell me with a straight face that wasn't vanity.

And annoying... My God, if you ever thought there couldn't be a movie character more annoying than Jar Jar Binks, then let me introduce you to Whitey Duvall. With his squeaky, hard to understand voice that sounds like a cat scraping its claws across a chalkboard while getting crushed between the gears of a combine.  I was actually rooting for the sociopath Davey to hit him in the back of the head with a shovel to him him out of his misery and out of mine!

Eight Crazy Nights is two horrible hours of bad jokes, terrible songs, and Sandler whacking himself off over his cartoonish avatar. It tries to be South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, yet it's not funny, not clever, and not even watchable. This is probably the worst animated movie I've seen since I was unfortunate enough to watch the Hercules and Xena movie and at least THAT had unintentional laughs.

Skip this one and avoid it like the plague. You need to spend eight bucks on this movie like you need to swallow thumbtacks. The best part is when the end credits roll (No, I'm really not kidding... that's when you hear the new version of The Hanukah Song which is about the only real funny this movie has to offer).