Grown Ups (film)
Grown Ups is a 2010 American comedy film directed by Dennis Dugan and written by Adam Sandler and Fred Wolf. It stars Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider. The film tells a story of five lifelong friends who won their middle school basketball championship in 1978. They reunite three decades later for a 4th of July weekend after learning about the sudden death of their basketball coach.
Grown Ups was produced by Sandler's production company Happy Madison Productions and was distributed by Columbia Pictures. Sandler, Rock, Schneider, and Spade all joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in the 1990-1991 season; supporting cast including Colin Quinn, Maya Rudolph, Tim Meadows, and Norm Macdonald have also been SNL cast members. Despite receiving unfavorable reviews from critics, it grossed $271 million and led to a sequel, Grown Ups 2.
Plot
In 1978, childhood friends Lenny Feder, Eric Lamonsoff, Kurt McKenzie, Marcus Higgins, and Rob Hilliard win their junior high basketball championship, and celebrate at a lake house with their coach, Robert “Buzzer” Ferdinando.Thirty years later, Lenny is a successful Hollywood talent agent, married to fashion designer Roxanne; Eric claims to co-own a lawn furniture company, and his wife Sally still breastfeeds their 4-year-old son; Kurt is a stay-at-home dad whose wife Deanne is pregnant again, living with her mother; Rob is married to his much older fourth wife, Gloria; and Marcus is a slacker and lothario.
When Buzzer dies, the friends reunite for his funeral, returning to their hometown with their families. Lenny rents the lake house for everyone to stay over Fourth of July weekend, though his family is leaving early to attend Roxanne’s fashion show in Milan. He pushes his spoiled sons to play outside, and runs into his childhood nemesis Dickie, whose team lost the basketball championship. As the friends spread Buzzer's ashes, Rob breaks down in regret over his failed marriages, and reveals that he has invited his estranged daughters Jasmine, Amber, and Bridget to visit. The men play “arrow roulette”, shooting an arrow straight into the air, and Rob wins by not running for cover, but the arrow impales his foot. Lenny is thrilled to find the kids playing with cup-and-string telephones; Roxanne realizes the positive impact the weekend is having on their children, and tells Lenny to cancel their Milan trip and stay at the lake instead.
Everyone visits a water park, where Marcus flirts Jasmine and Amber after buying them skimpy bikinis, and Eric convinces his son to stop breastfeeding. The families cause chaos throughout the park: Rob pushes a ride attendant down a waterslide when he insults Rob’s other daughter Bridget for being less attractive than her sisters; the husbands ignore warnings about a chemical in the children's pool that turns urine blue; and the wives ogle a bodybuilder, then jeer at his high-pitched Canadian accent. At the zipline ride, Lenny and his friends encounter Dickie and his former teammates, including Wiley, who is severely injured after sliding down the zipline by his feet. Returning to the lake house, Lenny teaches his son to shoot a bank shot, and the couples end the night dancing together.
The next day, Rob attacks Marcus, mistakenly believing that he slept with Jasmine, and Marcus admits to feeling insecure compared to his happily married friends. Everyone comes clean about the state of their lives: Roxanne confronts Lenny for canceling their flight to Milan before they left home, and he admits that he wanted their family to have a normal vacation; Deanne confronts Kurt for spending time with the Feders' nanny Rita, and Kurt explains how underappreciated he feels; Eric reveals that he was laid off from his job; and Rob admits what everybody already knows – that he wears a toupee. Gloria helps everyone reconcile, and Lenny and Kurt offer to help Eric start a new business.
On their last day at the lake house, Lenny and his friends agree to a basketball rematch against Dickie and their former opponents. The game culminates in Lenny and Greg facing Dickie and his son, but Lenny misses the game-deciding shot. As the families watch the Fourth of July fireworks, Lenny tells Roxanne that he let Dickie's family win, and felt that his own family needed to know what losing feels like. A drunken Marcus plays another game of arrow roulette, and the crowd flees in panic; Wiley, trapped in a full-body cast, is struck in the foot by the arrow and declares, "We win again!" before fainting.
Cast
Production
Filming commenced in Essex County, Massachusetts, in August 2009.Release
Box office
Grown Ups grossed $162 million in the United States and $109.4 million in other territories for a worldwide gross of $271.4 million against a production budget of $80 million. Grown Ups surpassed Click to become Sandler's highest-grossing film worldwide. Happy with the gross, Adam Sandler showed his appreciation by buying brand-new Maserati sports cars for his four co-stars.Critical response
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 10% based on 165 reviews and an average rating of 3.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Grown Ups cast of comedy vets is amiable, but they're let down by flat direction and the scattershot, lowbrow humor of a stunted script." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 30 out of 100 based on reviews from 32 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.Connie Ogle of the Miami Herald referred to it as "the perfect poster child for this maddening summer of movie mediocrity." Rick Groen of The Globe and Mail criticized what he saw as blatant commercialism, saying the cast "lob gags they surely disdain at an audience they probably despise while reserving their own laughter for that off-camera dash all the way to the bank." Richard Roeper went as far as to say that it was "a blight upon the bright canvas of American cinema", and that he hated it. Tom Long of the Detroit News called it "trite comedy" and "total garbage." On the other end of the spectrum, Lisa Kennedy of the Denver Post called it "crude and decent-hearted" and "easy, breezy, predictable."
Awards
was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor for the film, but lost to Jackson Rathbone for both The Last Airbender and .The film won at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards for the "Best Line from a Movie" category, which it won for the line "I want to get chocolate wasted!", delivered by Becky, played by Alexys Nycole Sanchez.