To say that That’s My Boy is a step up from the recent output of Adam Sandler and his company Happy Madison Productions really is to suggest only that the film isn’t likely to be screened as some sort of new Guantanamo interrogation technique. Jack and Jill, Zookeeper, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star — these movies aren’t merely bad, they’re sandpaper-on-skin excruciating, unfunny to the point of inspiring hostility toward whoever’s chosen to make them. Sandler, once upon a time, was king of a winning kind of anarchic, gleeful stupidity — Billy Madison holds up so well (seriously, it does) because it feels like it’s just every idiotic gag that he and his buddies could come up with while crowded around a table littered with bongs and beer cans, crammed into an hour and a half. These late features have an undercurrent of misanthropy — their silliness isn’t inclusive, its confrontational and unpleasant, as if it was a chore to have to be bothered to actually make the movie in order to get everyone paid.
That’s My Boy, which was directed by Sean Anders (of Sex Drive) from a script by Happy Endings creator David Caspe, isn’t nearly as problematically hateful (with the exception of the introduction, which I’ll get to later). It’s a celebration of vintage ’80s dirtbaggery, a beer-guzzling, bird-flipping rebuke to contemporary calorie-counting, omega male meekness that finds Sandler back in only somewhat worse-for-wear form as an agent of chaos. He plays Donny Berger, an aging Massachusetts party boy (the phrase “wicked” gets a workout) whose onetime fame/infamy has faded along with his income until he finds himself facing three years in jail for failing to pay his taxes unless he can come up with $43,000 by next week. Donny’s only got a few bucks to…
