Grown Ups

Every middle-aged ‘Saturday Night Live’ alumnus grazing the wider pastures of Hollywood comes to a big decision: do you follow the model of Steve Martin and traipse into middlebrow mania? Or, like Bill Murray (and, to a lesser degree, the Mike Myers of ‘The Love Guru’), do you pursue your muse even further into go-it-alone weirdness? Adam Sandler may have made his choice. After flirting with some fascinating sourness in Judd Apatow’s ‘Funny People’, he’s ready to sweeten up a bit; ‘Grown Ups’, a benignly crude slice of family hysteria, reunites him with ex-‘SNL’-ers Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider (plus obligatory chubster Kevin James), as former 12-year-old basketball teammates drawn together decades later when their coach kicks the bucket.

Back to their old summer lodge they go, along with several impossibly attractive wives – the breast-feeding Maria Bello; a quietly dominating Maya Rudolph; high-strung fashion fiend Salma Hayek Pinault (who?) – plus a swarm of carefully written kids destined to wise up in the great outdoors. No viewer goes into this movie expecting John Cassavetes’s ‘Husbands’, least of all from soft-serve director Denis Dugan (‘You Don’t Mess with the Zohan’). But would it have been such a crushing blow to these stars’ egos if they’d accommodated a little honest anxiety, instead of the typical lake-rope-swinging mishaps and an inevitable Steve Buscemi cameo? Telegraphed down to the final shot of a basketball contest, ‘Grown Ups’ suggests a mask being torn off to reveal another one: the male fantasy of cheerleader spouse, well-adjusted kids and expanding waistline.