Movie Review: Jack and Jill

Sibling ribaldry: It’s twice the Sandler as Jack and Jill

By By Mick LaSalle
Houston Chronicle

Adam Sandler became tolerable on screen — even appealing — and gradually, even someone to anticipate with pleasure — when he stopped playing characters and started playing a version of himself. This Adam Sandler, the one who is Jewish, successful, sarcastic and composed, isn’t a comic but a funny straight man with a clear-eyed view of the world. He shows up in every movie, and it’s good to see him. In Jack and Jill, he’s called Jack, a successful creator of television advertising campaigns.

Alas, the other Sandler shows up here, too, as Jill, Jack’s twin sister from the Bronx. To the extent Jill has any reality for the audience, she is a washout, a whining, self-pitying, loud, witless, insufferable character who never shuts up and never says anything worth hearing. But, in fact, she has no reality at all. Nothing was done to make Jill look anything but like Sandler in bad drag, and Sandler does nothing to create a specific character, besides soften his voice and talk with a lisp. The performance is lazy and slapdash, the work of a comedian trusting too much in his own hilariousness.

The result is that scenes between Jack and Jill are tolerable because of Jack. Scenes of Jack without Jill are pretty good or better. And scenes of only Jill are work to sit through.

But then, that’s the funny thing about Jack and Jill, funny in both senses of the word. Though the Jill problem is too insurmountable to ignore, most everything else in this comedy succeeds. The central situation, about a guy who dreads the yearly visit of his needy and easily injured twin, has comic energy. Even better, the side plot, in which Jack might lose his business if he can’t get Al Pacino to do a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, is a comedy goldmine.

Pacino plays himself, but what he really plays is the exaggerated Pacino that is in the public mind, the one who can go from quiet to screaming in a second or less. We first meet him onstage, costumed as Richard III and ranting at an audience member over a ringing cell phone. It’s the kind of self-spoof that famous actors take on as a way of saying, “If I can mock myself in this way, I’m obviously not like this at all.” In fact, the Pacino here is not that far away from the obsessive Pacino we find in the upcoming documentary, Wilde Salome, which he directed himself. But then, comedy won’t work without an element of truth.

Jack and Jill shamelessly and effectively references Pacino’s films, including all three Godfather movies. It also gives him a line that’s the funniest in the movie, though on the night I saw it no one laughed. Maybe no one ever will laugh, but look for it: At one point, Pacino is talking about birds and says, “I used to raise pigeons ... Oh, wait, no, that was Brando.” There’s a whole world of madness in that line.

So Jack and Jill is strange a one, with successful bits and big moments of satisfying comedy, interspersed with long sections that are just annoying. You may still be on the fence about it, so here’s a last morsel of information that should tip you one way or the other: Jack and Jill was made with a children’s audience in mind, so it abounds with flatulence and excretion jokes. Jill eats Mexican food.

Case closed.