I have never seen a film this bad. Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Star Wars Holiday Special, these are Oscar-nominated films by comparison. I struggle to pare down the list of adjectives for 'horrible' that I'll use here.
I'd summarize the plot, but other reviewers have covered that fairly well. Let's get on to the strangeness *behind* this surprisingly horrible film.
The interesting thing is that it's horrible by design, in the sense that it isn't bad because the people making it were inexperienced or simply among the worst in the entire film industry. Adam Sandler's production company 'Happy Madison Productions' has produced a fair number of films that have done well, if generally with questionable taste in every aspect.
The first thing you'll find puzzling when seeing this film is 'This had a budget of 80 MILLION - where did it go?'. 'Independence Day' cost 5 million less than this and you have much, much, much higher production values. The film's actual cost of production looks to have been closer to about 5 million, if that. The rest went to line the pockets of... Well, I'm sure you can make an educated guess.
The commercial product placement alone is beyond the pale - there is a full-blown TV style commercial right in the middle for a cruise line. It looks like a TV commercial, it feels like a TV commercial, then you're back to movie-land. The cruise line was so kind to shoot footage for them!
Dunkin Donuts also bears much of the shame for this entire debacle. They have a commercial at the end that is just... Well, it's so bad you have to see it. It will leave you with absolutely no respect for Al Pacino, if you had any left after making it through the majority of the film. I don't know what sort of bills he has to pay, but they must be horrific if he's accepting work like this now.
This is one of those movies that will end up in film criticism text books citing how bad things became at this point in history. If it were only so bad that it became unintentionally funny, it would deserve a spot on the wall with Mano: Hands of Fate. But it's deliberately bad, just the bare minimum to pose as a film and get money into the hands of the producer and his friends. The sad thing is, they did nothing illegal. Not even Uwe Boll financially questionable. They just figured out how to game the system, I congratulate them on that. The sales execs at Pepto-Bismol, Coke, Royal Canadian Cruise Lines, Dunkin Donuts and Sony really need to learn when to draw the line on product placement. But this is really a case where no one could say no, to the detriment of all that is good in this world.
See this movie at some point, but do not spend any money to do so. See it only to know how bad movies can be.
I'd summarize the plot, but other reviewers have covered that fairly well. Let's get on to the strangeness *behind* this surprisingly horrible film.
The interesting thing is that it's horrible by design, in the sense that it isn't bad because the people making it were inexperienced or simply among the worst in the entire film industry. Adam Sandler's production company 'Happy Madison Productions' has produced a fair number of films that have done well, if generally with questionable taste in every aspect.
The first thing you'll find puzzling when seeing this film is 'This had a budget of 80 MILLION - where did it go?'. 'Independence Day' cost 5 million less than this and you have much, much, much higher production values. The film's actual cost of production looks to have been closer to about 5 million, if that. The rest went to line the pockets of... Well, I'm sure you can make an educated guess.
The commercial product placement alone is beyond the pale - there is a full-blown TV style commercial right in the middle for a cruise line. It looks like a TV commercial, it feels like a TV commercial, then you're back to movie-land. The cruise line was so kind to shoot footage for them!
Dunkin Donuts also bears much of the shame for this entire debacle. They have a commercial at the end that is just... Well, it's so bad you have to see it. It will leave you with absolutely no respect for Al Pacino, if you had any left after making it through the majority of the film. I don't know what sort of bills he has to pay, but they must be horrific if he's accepting work like this now.
This is one of those movies that will end up in film criticism text books citing how bad things became at this point in history. If it were only so bad that it became unintentionally funny, it would deserve a spot on the wall with Mano: Hands of Fate. But it's deliberately bad, just the bare minimum to pose as a film and get money into the hands of the producer and his friends. The sad thing is, they did nothing illegal. Not even Uwe Boll financially questionable. They just figured out how to game the system, I congratulate them on that. The sales execs at Pepto-Bismol, Coke, Royal Canadian Cruise Lines, Dunkin Donuts and Sony really need to learn when to draw the line on product placement. But this is really a case where no one could say no, to the detriment of all that is good in this world.
See this movie at some point, but do not spend any money to do so. See it only to know how bad movies can be.