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A romance ripped from the pages of Deuteronomy, Frank Coraci’s Blended posits that the best
reason for a woman with sons and a man with daughters to get married is that they can take care of each
other’s kids. Quel pragmatisme! In the world of this sitcom love story, men are from Mars and women
should be from a defiled menstrual tent far enough away that Adam Sandler won’t have to hear them talk
about tampons. (To be fair, in Blended even an elderly pharmacy clerk is eager to tell Sandler
about the size of her vagina.)
Sandler and Drew Barrymore play single parents with zero dating experience whose first blind date is,
naturally, a disaster. Their characters married before college graduation, managed to spawn five kids
between them, and yet, despite spending almost two decades with their former spouses (one dead, one a
dick), have never learned anything about the opposite sex. Hell, they could have learned everything they
needed to know about each other by watching another romantic comedy as bad as this: He’s the schlub
who mans a sports store with Shaq; she’s the pearlclenching workaholic who coowns a closetorganizing
company.
Will she school him on responsibility? Will he teach her to loosen up? Duh. Will Blended take two
hours and a trip to Africa to get there while implanting uncomfortable messages like “girls aren’t pretty
without long hair”? Alas, yes.
The only thing exceptional about this thirdtime pairing of Sandler and Barrymore is how tonedeaf it is
about romance. In fact, it hardly seems to believe in romance in at all — the couple’s big gooey
speech is all about how their kids come first. It’s also tone deaf about Sandler’s increasingly strained
appeal. The fun of his early career was watching his goons earn our love. Here, he’s more oafish than
ever, a porn obsessive who acts like Rain Man and accuses Barrymore of being a lesbian for hugging a
female friend (the toogoodforthisbutatleastshe’sworking Wendi McLendonCovey); he doesn’t earn
our love, he demands it.
As for the everempathetic Barrymore, she’s too sweet to play shrill. Instead of the blossoming tenderness
of The Wedding Singer (which Coraci also directed), we now have a couple united by their fear of
sexuality: When Barrymore sees a stripper pole, she shrieks, and the first time Sandler sees his 15year
old daughter (Bella Thorne) in a dress, his mind blasts “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”
Luckily or unluckily for them, the back flips of the script kick them and their broods to an unnamed country
in Africa (what, every nation was too scared to take credit?) where the locals are all incompetent and
salivating over Western mating habits. Barrymore and Sandler can’t even consider a kiss without resort
singer Terry Crews creeping behind them and crooning about it. If only Crews could drop the mic, grab
Shaq, and go make their own movie.
