Rex Ryan (
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An oddball cast including Vanilla Ice (above, left) and Jets coach Rex Ryan (inset) join Adam Sandler (above, right) and Andy Samberg, who play an estranged father and son. (
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There’s one movie out this weekend that gets tragic haircuts, intemperate partying, perpetual adolescence and heavy metal, and it isn’t “Rock of Ages.” Adam Sandler’s “That’s My Boy” is as crude as a Van Halen album title (see “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge,” “O.U.8.1.2”), but more than a few of its naughty-granny and strippers-with-neck-braces jokes made me laugh.
This one’s about halfway between Sandler’s sad little high-concept comedies and his interesting angry-loner movies (“Reign Over Me,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” “Funny People”). He’s Donny, a Massachusetts guy who became a legend in high school, where he did a lot more than clap erasers with his hottie teacher. Now he’s a pathetic burnout who drives around drinking Buds in a rusty little sports car with a Rush logo on the hood. Once he lived off the proceeds from a TV movie based on his high school scandal/triumph, but now his lawyer — played by Jets football coach Rex Ryan, who acts about as well as Tim Tebow throws a football — tells him he owes $43,000 in back taxes.
Donny decides to track down the boy his teacher bore him in high school, and ask him for a loan. The son (Andy Samberg) is now a successful hedge-fund manager, but also a Felix Unger-ish nervous wreck who carries a spare pair of underwear in his pocket in case of a colonic emergency. Can these two men bond? Will the younger one loosen up and the dad learn some responsibility? Who cares?
The point is that Sandler revives the word “WAZZZUP!,” gets it on with a grandma and parties with Vanilla Ice, who plays himself. Apparently Ice now sells nachos at a skating rink, which sounds right. He’s in the movie for about 20 minutes, or five minutes longer than his music career lasted. (Other cameos include Todd Bridges and Tony Orlando).
“That’s My Boy” is pretty raunchy, and by “pretty,” I mean “amazingly,” as in Howard Stern- or Seth MacFarlane-style gags. It started to amuse me about 20 minutes in, during a scene that involves simultaneously listening to Ratt, playing baseball and drinking beer, and is highlighted by a woman catching a ball in her cleavage. There is a single word for all this, and the word is: Massachusetts. (Which means “That’s My Boy” couldn’t be further from the campy, candy-ass, California-meets-Broadway vibe of “Rock of Ages.”)
Later on there’s an even more Massachusetts scene: This time, it’s all about Van Halen, smoking a bong in public, Donny’s crew leaving an ice-skating rink with the skates still on their feet and busting into a store to shotgun cans of Busch. (The owner at first chases the guys off with a shotgun, then decides they’re cool and joins them.)
Sandler seems simultaneously repulsed and delighted by the hard-rocking, Datsun-driving, working-class slobs among whom we fellow New Englanders grew up, which is probably a healthier stance than my own cringing disbelief.
Sandler plays the kind of guy who would make a present (at a wedding!) of a fake book called “How To Screw in the Dark” that is really a box containing a flashlight and a screwdriver. The kind of guy who would get his 8-year-old kid a huge New Kids on the Block tattoo because it’s funny. The kind of guy who, when forced to wear a tie at a cocktail reception on Cape Cod, would neglect to wear pants. His haircut isn’t even a mullet — it couldn’t be bothered to be anything specific. The guy’s a drunk, he’s immature, he’s an idiot, yet he’s got more honesty in him than the swells at the wedding even the Marine. In Massachusetts, getting into a fistfight with a priest (in this case, James Caan) is merely a lively story; what’s unforgivable is pretension.
Massachusetts: New Jersey minus the sophistication. I haven’t been hit with such a pure blast of my native state since “Gone Baby Gone.”
After punching an earring through his son’s previously unpierced ear — having taken care to sterilize the area with a slug of Bud — Donny ignores the blood on his boy’s cheek and approves his own work, saying, “There. Now you look like a drummer for Foreigner.”
Well, my cousin Brian Tichy served with distinction as Foreigner’s drummer, and I can hear him saying: What a great compliment.