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Click

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Trailer for "Click"

Here’s a premise that we can all relate to: Wouldn’t it be great to be able to control everything around you instead of everything always controlling you? Click stars Adam Sandler as an overworked corporate architect (I know, but just overlook that for the time being) who is finding it impossible to meet both the demands of his overbearing boss and the needs of his family. Salvation comes in the form of a universal remote control that merits its name: he can use it to pause, fast forward and rewind everything around him, adjust the volume, change the colors, even translate other languages.

I’m sure everyone reading this can think of about a zillion ways such a gizmo would come in handy. Unfortunately our hero only manages to think up about three, and the one he favors most doesn’t make any sense: Rather than put the world around him on pause while he catches up with his work, he fast-forwards his way though onerous chores. The drawback, which he (unlike the audience) never sees coming, is that this causes him to miss large chunks of his own life. This culminates in a shamelessly overwrought climax in which the film desperately wants to become a modern version of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Sandler’s traditional audience will doubtless be satiated by the sprinkling of dog-humping and fart jokes. They probably also won’t care that in Sandlerville there are only two kinds of women, bikini models and trolls. As for those hoping for something more adult from the man responsible for more bad movies than anyone else currently working (along with his own output, he has produced pretty much the entire cinematic outputs of Rob Schneider and David Spade), I can only ask: What the hell were you thinking?