Big Daddy

Release year: 1999
My Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Tagline: Nature called. Look who answered.

Synopsis: A lazy law school grad adopts a kid to impress his girlfriend, but everything doesn’t go as planned. Now he’s forced to grow up while navigating the challenges of fatherhood.

Another addition to the Adam Sandler classic collection. He was really on a roll for most of the 90s in making big hits. This one doesn't reach the same highs for me that Happy Gilmore or The Wedding Singer do though.

Big Daddy for me isn't an outright bad movie, but it is very boring, and that is what I remember the most from it. It's not like I went in not wanting to like this movie, heck I was just pleasantly surprised by The Waterboy, so I think I even expected to like it, but unfortunately there wasn't much to bring me in.

Adam Sandler I think gives another pretty good performance, but I don't feel like there's anything uniquely special about it here. I think he's having more fun than in Bulletproof, but I don't think he has the same energy in this one that he has in his more popular movies. However, there is the moment where the kid gets taken away from him, and his acting in that scene is incredibly good. This might be the first time we see him legitimately cry in any movie, and I gotta say, it got me right in the feels.

Ultimately, I feel like the most interesting thing about Big Daddy is its cast. We have Steve Buscemi here again making him have a 50% percent attendance in Sandler movies up to this point which is wild. We have the Sprouse twins making their film debut here, and it's wild to see them so young here before they went on to star in The Suite Life of Zach and Cody. We have Sandler's future wife featured in her first credited role in an Adam Sandler movie before she eventually will become a staple, so it's interesting to see that. Probably the weirdest person to see in this movie is Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame. He plays a pretty big role here as the guy who Sandler adopts his kid from. I know he has been an actor in the past, but it just feels strange seeing him outside of the political sphere.

Rob Schneider pictured center

But I must acknowledge the elephant in the room. This is the first in a long line of Adam Sandler movies in which Rob Schnieder portrays someone of a different race than his own. Maybe there was some time in which people thought it was funny for him to do this, but this becomes such a consistent thing for him to do in Sandler movies to the point where it's kinda his main schtick, and I certainly ain't laughing. This is by no means the most offensive role he's been in, but it does drag to movie down. For the record, Schneider is part Filipino and part Ashkenazi so maybe he feels that he's racially ambiguous enough in appearance for this to be okay, but almost never does he play someone from any of his ethnic backgrounds. He plays a Middle Eastern food delivery guy here, and I don't think it's okat now, and it wasn't okay then.

Big Daddy is an alright movie, and I don't have much more to say about it. This feels like it could be the start of many similar performances for Sandler where he and the movie he stars in are pretty middling.