Yeah, ‘Just Go With It’

Adam Sandler’s comedies in the last few years have mostly portrayed him as irresistible and super-attractive, so if you’ve gotten used to that idea, you can pretty much suspend disbelief early on. In the aptly titled “Just Go With It,” he’s desired by younger, attractive women, easily falling for the sensitive plastic surgeon who pretends to be on the verge of a divorce. He even enlists his assistant, a single mother played by Jennifer Aniston, to create the illusion of an unhappy marriage, her children posing as his own. They all go to Hawaii with his new girl, a hot blonde teacher played by Brooklyn Decker, to demonstrate how good he is as a parent. Yep, just go with it.

The humor is pretty much what one would expect from a Sandler-starrer. There are the oddball kids, weirdo friends, deception-related pratfalls, and so on. There are pleasant surprises, such as Nicole Kidman’s appearance as some uber-competitive rival of Aniston’s character, married to the guy “who invented the iPod,” played by Dave Matthews (already a Sandler flick fixture).

Of course, this being a romantic comedy, there’s the cute initially platonic relationship between the faux couple, which actually isn’t bad or corny; it’s when things become serious and the two expectedly discover feelings for each other that the steady extraction of laughs just suddenly stops. And we don’t even get to see how the big revelation went between the plastic surgeon and his younger girlfriend after the epiphany.

The Sandler-Aniston pairing is comfy, regardless. “Just Go With It” succeeds to some extent in creating funny scenarios out of complicated family situations, but is one of the more generic, lesson-imparting projects in Sandler’s filmography.