Movie Review: Click (2006)

Why

Any review of the movie Click (2006) starring Adam Sandler must first address the question: why?

Why did you watch Click?

The only two good answers are "ironically" and "accidentally," and in this case it was a bit of both. My younger son (11) has a joke he's run into the ground where whenever we try to decide what to watch for family movie night, he keeps suggesting the worst Adam Sandler movies, which is funny for about 5 seconds and increasingly less funny as an hour creeps by and it's too late to start a movie. Click is his favorite title to beat this dead horse with.

Now cut to my older son (13) who diligently spent a month to earn a $5 gift certificate from Half-Price Books by reading every day and checking it off on their reading log, even though nobody was going to ask for any proof. He had a curious sense of honor where he was committed to earning the voucher by reading every day and refused to simply lie about it. On the other hand, what he was reading was Pokemon manga, which I don't think was in the spirit of the promotion.

In any case, we turned it in to the clerk, who, as I thought, didn't even look at it, and got his voucher. He was unable to find anything he wanted, because, as you might guess from his reading choice, he doesn't really like books. He was mostly browsing through the used video game section, which obviously had nothing worthwhile under $5, as I could have told him a month ago.

We had finally decided to leave when we passed the DVD section and he suddenly had the idea to look for Click. Lo and behold, there was a copy for just under $5. He had found the perfect gag gift for his brother's upcoming birthday.

Fast forward to one week before the younger boy's birthday, when our dog died. She was 14 1/2. She was there before the boys, and before our marriage. Needless to say, this was pretty devastating. You can imagine how rough this was on all of us, but the smallest boy was taking it especially hard. He cried pretty much nonstop for the next day, and still has crying spells even now, over a week later. It's the first time he's experienced any death since he was old enough to understand it.

I had to have a lot of talks with him about death, mortality, the limited time we have on earth, and not having regrets. Fun stuff.

We were a little worried if he would be recovered enough to enjoy his birthday, and more importantly, fully enjoy the humor of being surprised with Click but he got just the right amount of better, just in time.

When he opened the box and saw the DVD, he reacted with the pained smile of someone who has been hoisted by his own petard. "Thank you," he said, his face twisted in pain. "It's... so good."

"Now you have to watch it," we said. He didn't argue. He understood he had brought this on himself.

"By myself?" he asked.

"Yeah, knock yourself out," I said.

He popped it in the PS5 and I started fumbling around with the remote and my husband asked, "Are you actually going to watch this?"

Actually Watching It

I probably don't need to tell you that this movie was terrible. It might have been one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I asked my older son whether Click or the Star Wars prequels was worse, and he said, Click.

The biggest laugh came late in the movie during what I guess was supposed to be an emotional moment where Adam Sandler's character is seeing his elderly dad for the last time and points his remote at him to pause and treasure the moment or something, I don't know. It doesn't matter. Anyway my youngest son, the birthday boy, said, "Oh, I thought he was about to shoot him."

Completely unclear why he would think that. I don't even think there was a gun in the entire movie. We spent some time trying to figure this out and it was probably the funniest gag in the movie.

I guess I should probably mention at this point what the premise of the movie is, just in case anyone isn't familiar with the cultural touchstone that is Click. Adam Sandler's character is annoyed with his life for very mild and uncompelling reasons and he gets a magical remote control which allows him to pause, mute, and most importantly, fast forward through life. He fast forwards through all the annoying and inconvenient parts of his life and misses out on, you know, family and all that, and regrets it, and is sorry, and it all turns out to be a dream and he gets a second chance.

Basically it's one of the worst adaptations of A Christmas Carol ever made.

Click's Bizarre Vision of the Future

The most interesting theme of the movie is their weird conception of the future. The movie was made in and presumably set in 2006. The first time jump skips to the far off year of 2017, which for some reason has robot assistants and digital window blinds. It eventually ends up in 2029 which appears to be the world of Star Trek.

I realize that it's pretty normal for movies to miss about the future but this seems like a bit of a stretch for "23 years from now".

The Pause Button

Now, Adam Sandler can't go back in time, but the remote has a pause button, and he even uses it a few times. This is clearly the most powerful feature he has, and he completely ignores it most of the time.

This is a time stop. This is a superpower that is so OP that an entire season of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is built around a villain's elaborate plan to keep the guy with the time stop away from the action.

One of the biggest problems Adam Sandler's character is presented as having is a lack of money. I think it's pretty obvious that a time stop gives you a lot of options for solving this (e.g., bank robbery), and instead all he uses it for is to avoid boring conversations with his wife.

Makeup

Due to taking place over several decades, there is a lot of aging and de-aging makeup, as well as, for some reason, fat makeup, which was required for every movie of the era. All of it is terrible.

Which is why it was extremely bizarre to find out that Click was nominated for a Best Makeup Oscar, which it thankfully lost to Pan's Labyrinth. It's just jarring to see them in the same category when they should instead be used for bracketing the top and bottom of the scale.

Dog Humping FX

A disproportionate amount of the movie was dedicated to dog humping gags, and there was a DVD extra that showed how they did it. Apparently the dog actors were too well behaved to actually hump anything so they had somebody in a greenscreen suit grab the dog's butt and bounce it up and down on the thing they were supposed to hump.

I don't know if it's just me but that seems kind of problematic.

The End

As is the hallmark of every good movie, when we finished watching, the kids were completely stumped as to what it was about.

"It's very simple," I said. "It's about how life is short so the most valuable thing you can do with your time on earth is to spend as much of it as you can together with the people you love, which is not any less valuable even if it's spent doing something terrible, like watching Click."

Parents spend a lot of effort these days to try to orchestrate scenarios to "make memories" but if you remember your fondest memories with people you love, I bet there's more mistakes and farces and ordeals in the lot than carefully scripted photo perfect memories. It's up to you to make the time, and life will slip into those windows and make the treasured fiascoes happen. Losing someone you care about isn't a call to regret, it's a reminder to redouble your efforts to make time with the ones you still have.

Anyway, uh, one star.