What Keith's Watching: Grown Ups 2 (2013)

Grown Ups 2 is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I knew I was in trouble when the opening to the movie involves a deer peeing on Adam Sandler. From there, the movie seems to follow no storyline. There's no discernable plot to the movie that keeps the characters moving forward. At the end, you might be able to think back and see how things tied together, but while you're watchign the movie you almost feel like you're watching an ode to Slacker, only fucking atrocious.

The story, if it can be reffered to as that, seems to involve a group of friends and somehow they have an 80s-themed party. I don't know how this happens or why anyone cares. Not much effort was put into cause and effect as the focus seemed to be on cramming as many gags, "jokes," and slapstick into the movie as possible. Also crammed throughout the movie are many cameos from just about anyone who was ever on SNL. My assumption is that the producers made a bet along the lines of "I bet you can't fit a million cameos in this piece of junk." to which the other gentleman replied: "Challenge accepted!"

I can't help but wonder if this is the same type of humor that made Adam Sandler damous in the first place with Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. It's been so long since I've seen either one, I'm worried. But at least those movies had a story that I could follow and the character seemed to go through something and be better in the end. In Grown Ups 2, I'm not sure anything really happens to the characters except they have a crazy day and survive things that should leave them dead or severely injured. For a group of friends that are adults and have families, yet act like kids, you'd think maybe they'd learn to grow up. (You know, like the title of the movie.) But no, they don't. In fact, they seem to just bring others down around them. And not in the way where they teach someone not to take things too seriously and have a little fun, in the way to teach others to be dumbasses.

It's possible that I missed something by not seeing the first movie, but that's an awful lot to dump on the shoulders of one movie. I can't believe that one movie would fix all the problems with the sequel -- primarily the lack of laughter. In the 100 minutes of this movie, I laughed zero times. How many times did my fiancee laught? Once. Maybe I would have laughed more if I wasn't trying to figure out what was going on, or what the point was, or trying to understand why every single character had to have their own seperate storyline.

It might have also helped if I wasn't distracted by the ridiculous amount of CGI in this movie. For a movie about 4 friends, there seems to be an awful lot of CGI. Presumably for laughs, but that didn't happen. (Remember the pissing deer?)

The real tragedy of Grown Ups 2 is that it made almost $240 million, so I assume we'll be seeing a Grown Ups 3. Maybe they'll remember jokes this time.

VERDICT: AVOID AT ALL COST