Here's a Christmas movie about a suicide hotline. Doesn't this sound delicious and ridiculous? Well, no. The film is about a massive pile of rotten Christmas pudding laced with arsenic sauce. It's not humor, it's not dark humor or satire, it's just 1 hour: 33 minutes of stupidity, but that doesn't matter now. What matters is this question. What we have here is a terrible, terrible and unfunny movie with a Metacritic score of 14/100. The question is: As horrific and lethal as this movie is, does Adam Sandler's presence make it exponentially worse? certainly!
The cast of this movie wasn't chopped up, but maybe it should have been. We have 3 depressed and clueless people running a suicide hotline. They have an oceanfront office in Venice, California, but are about to be evicted. Other characters include a trans woman whose family hates her (Liev Schreiber!), a depressed and pregnant Gracie (Juliette Lewis), and a doozy of a boyfriend named Felix who wears a Santa suit. Felix becomes so frustrated with Gracie that he takes an animal tranquilizer and rushes to the lifeguard's office. Thirty seconds into the film, one of them leads to the tragic death of his landlord (Garry Shandling) and the other to Steven Wright's suicide. More on that later. Funny, right?
You might think that with Steve Martin and Madeline Kahn this movie would be almost incidentally funny, but that's not the case. Kahn spends the first half of the movie trapped in an elevator, screaming like a wounded Wolverine. Poor Liev Schreiber did well in his first film as a transvestite, but surprisingly the film didn't kill his career. Adam Sandler plays Louie, a ukulele player in a goofy sailor suit who, instead of quoting his lines, sings...along with his ukulele . Yes, the bar for this movie is very low.
With these stupid staff, everyone accidentally got together to eat Chinese in the suicide office, which of course is a very bad thing. As I mentioned earlier, a stray bullet entered the head of the landlord, who was there to repair the elevator. The staffer, who was as brilliant as Trump's legal team, hatched a plan to disguise the dead landlord as a Christmas tree and place him on the boardwalk without anyone noticing. Unfortunately, all of Venice took notice, including the police.
Oh, but through a quirk of fate, suspension of disbelief and all our sanity, things worked out...because, you know...Christmas! I cut out Christmas movies a lot, but this one was so stupid it almost killed me. Yes, I always look at science.