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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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Grown Ups (2010)

Rating: 1 Star (out of 4)

Kid Stuff

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Let's hope Adam Sandler, his buddies Kevin James, Rob Schneider, Chris Rock and David Spade, and his most frequent director, Dennis Dugan, had a great time on their movie vacation Grown Ups, because the audience isn't really invited. Only the most cursory attempt was made at things like characters, jokes and entertainment for the customers. We get the usual ancient attempts: faces plowed into piles of excrement, farting, peeing, and juvenile stabs at sex talk, with Rock dreadfully miscast as an effeminate house-husband, while the best humor probably happened offscreen.

As kids, the five friends won a basketball championship. Now their beloved coach dies, and they re-assemble for a funeral and a fun July Fourth weekend! Somehow talent like Selma Hayek and Maria Bello agreed to play characters' wives. Dugan's last two films with Sandler at least had some outrageous, brave set-ups, but this feels like arrested development.

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Trailer | Poster | Soundtrack

With: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, Maya Rudolph, Joyce Van Patten, Ebony Jo-Ann, Di Quon, Steve Buscemi, Colin Quinn, Tim Meadows, Madison Riley, Jamie Chung, Ashley Loren
Written by: Adam Sandler, Fred Wolf
Directed by: Dennis Dugan
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude material including suggestive references, language and some male rear nudity
Running Time: 102 minutes
Date: June 25, 2010

Please also see my review at Las Vegas Weekly