Jack Sadelstein (Adam Sandler) is a successful L.A. advertising executive with wife Erin (Katie Holmes) and kids. He hates Thanksgiving when his twin sister Jill (Adam Sandler) visits.
Rarely do I hate a movie. I always appreciate how hard it is to get something done. So there has to be something dramatically wrong, morally repugnant, or societally damaging. As much as it was annoying the heck out of me, it didn't fall to the lowest rating. I give it one notch up from the bottom. Jack is actually functional, and I'm willing to see how Katie Holmes would screw this up. But Jill is horrible. She is ugly (on the inside). I wouldn't sit and listen to her in real life. So why should I sit and watch her on screen. Save yourself and skip this! Even if you're a die-hard Adam Sandler fan.
Jack and Jill
2011
Action / Comedy / Family / Horror
Jack and Jill
2011
Action / Comedy / Family / Horror
Plot summary
Jack Sadelstein is a successful advertising executive in Los Angeles, with a beautiful wife and kids, who dreads one event each year--the Thanksgiving visit of his fraternal twin sister, Jill. Jill's neediness and passive-aggressiveness is maddening to Jack, turning his normally tranquil life upside down.
Uploaded by: OTTO
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
720p.BLU 1080p.BLUMovie Reviews
Avoid Avoid Avoid
Jill is, perhaps, one of the easiest characters to hate that I've ever seen in a film.
Before I get to the review, I want to talk a bit about twins. While the film is about fraternal twins (all boy/girl twins are fraternal),so many of the jokes are about identical twins and how they think and act and look alike. Fraternal twins are no more genetically similar than any brother and sister....so a lot of the act alike, think alike, feel alike jokes in the film are wrong and the only way this COULD work was if either Jack or Jill underwent sexual reassigment surgery and both were born the same gender. So, for this film, it SHOULD have been about twin boys...identical ones.
Adam Sandler plays both Jack and his fraternal twin, Jill. Jill comes for a visit and is about as welcome and pleasant as Ebola. To say she is incredibly annoying is right on the mark! And, not surprisingly, Jack is annoyed by her and can't wait until this visit is complete. The audience feels pretty much the same about Jill! All the scatological jokes involving this character didn't help any!
So does this film work? Good grief, no! The film is currently #38 on IMDB's infamous Bottom 100 List...and the film has set a record for most Razzie awards. This is because Adam Sandler was able to do something unprecidented...he won for Worst Actor AND Worst Actress!! In addition, it took home Razzies for Worst Picture and took home a total of 9 of these trophies!
I think the reason it got so many Razzies and is rated so low is due to two things. First, the annoyance factor...Jill is so annoying and easy to hate that it's really hard to watch the film. Second, in recent years, Sandler has been in career freefall due to some very bad choices and it's become fashionable to hate his films. But is it among the worst movies I've ever seen? Not even close. An Ed Wood, Al Adamson or Willaim Grefe film would be much worse. But in the case of these filmmakers, they spent almost nothing to make a crap film...and Columbia spent a staggering $79,000,000 to make this crap! That's enough money to make an entire list of bad films!! So, while I hardly think it's among the worst films I've seen, it is, dollar for dollar, the worst...and it's a film that is completely brainless and annoying from start to finish.
By the way, a couple things saddened me about this film. I find it hard to believe that Al Pacino would appear in such an awful mess and playing a man who is infatuated with Jill AND I was annoyed to hear one of my favorite songs in the movie. I now don't know if I can ever hear "Don't Bring Me Down" by ELO again without thinking of this godawful film. I could, however, easily believe that David Spade, Vince Offer and Shaquille O'Neal were in this film...they were right in their element.
Ladies and gentlemen, here it is, Adam Sandler's worst movie!
I like comedy when it is funny. I have to admit though, apart from Punch Drunk Love, Reign Over Me, Spanglish, The Wedding Singer, 50 First Dates and Happy Gilmore I have never liked Adam Sandler. I often find his acting style irritating, his characters unlikeable and apart from five or six exceptions his films poorly written with not much point to them.
As much as I didn't think much of Little Nicky, You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Funny People and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry(generally Anger Management, The Longest Yard, Click and The Waterboy I had mixed feelings on) neither of them are as painful to watch as this one. The trailer was enough to make me wish the ground had swallowed me up, and the film managed to be every bit as bad.
So why did I see Jack and Jill in the first place if I didn't like Sandler? One reason really. Al Pacino. I consider this man a great actor, and this is not just The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Scent of a Woman and Carlito's Way as I consider his performance in Godfather Part II one of the all-time great male performances.
When I saw the movie on Tinyurl, having an inkling it would be bad but Pacino would be at least decent, in my opinion this is as awful as I was hearing. This is not just Adam Sandler's worst film, but also one of the worst of the year and one of the worst I've seen recently.
Jack and Jill is a cheap-looking movie, with not much attention to slick editing or continuity and the lighting also manages to be dull. Of Sandler's movies, Jack and Jill is perhaps the worst-directed, because the director throughout seemed to be rushing through it. The soundtrack at best is forgettable, and doesn't seem dynamic with what's going on on screen.
The acting is awful. Adam Sandler is a big part of the film's problem. None of his characters are likable, instead they are very annoying and Sandler's performance is samey and irritating throughout. Not only that, Jill is introduced too quickly with a severe lack of build-ups, and Sandler as a woman in all honesty is not pretty, sorry I had to say.
I was hoping that Al Pacino would elevate just a little bit, as he was the only redeeming quality of Gigli, another example of a bad film. Alas, he spends the entire movie looking bored, almost as if what am I doing here, and the performance reads very much of him playing himself. The cameos don't engage either, they are not funny, in fact pretty much nobody seems to have a sense of comic timing, and just come and go. Nicky Swardson fares best, surprising seeing as I don't regard him very highly either.
Worse are the script, characters and story. In regards to the script and the humour, Jack and Jill fails utterly. The dialogue is atrocious, very immature and hackneyed, while the physical and visual humour just left a bad taste in the mouth. I get that it was meant to be funny and not to be exactly subtle, but the poop jokes for example got really embarrassing and left me more disgusted than amused.
Story-wise, Jack and Jill lacks any kind of structure, it all feels very broken and rushed. As for the characters, they are either annoying, shallow or both, I finished the film not only not caring for them but also forgetting them.
All in all, Sandler's worst movie and one of the worst(I think only Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star, a movie I saw out of curiosity with little else to do, was worse) of a very hit-and-miss year. 0/10 Bethany Cox