Hubie Halloween (Netflix)
Starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Julie Bowen, Ray Liotta, Rob Schneider
Directed by Steven Brill
Rating: *
For years Adam Sandler played the goofy pranksters who doesn’t take life seriously. Then just when he proved his brilliance in Uncut Gems, which is to Sandler what Raging Bull is to Robert de Niro, comes this abomination a Halloween special which had me wanting to throw up my hands in despair, and then just throw up.
It’s a homage to the most moronic tenets of screenwriting more absurd illogical and unbearable than anything I’ve seen for Halloween. And the excuse that it’s holiday blueschaser(so just chill) just doesn’t work.Lighthearted entertainment and brainless non-entertainment separate subjects , never destined to come together .
Sandler who takes ‘credit’(ha!) as co-writer plays a kind selfimportant doggooder whom everyone heckles,taunts and bullies. But Hubie has a good heart which comes ambling to the surface during Halloween when all kinds of strange incidents began to take over in the small backwater American town of Salem.
The sense of community intimacy is discernible in the lot. But little of anything else, including Sandler’s insistence on delivering his dialogues as though he had just gargled on horse urine, makes sense. Most of all, the very existence of this film is suspect. Why the utterly vacuous plot, if not to shame Sandler and the many other talented cast members including Steve Buscemi who thinks he is 400 years old.
I came out of the ordeal feeling pretty aged myself. There is a towering sense of despair in the audience that grows as the characters go from bully to bullied. The movement of the plot betrays a lack of conviction in the writers. The plot drags its feet through the homes of many characters who serve as no more than a blur . There is evil in the air, and don’t we know it! Spending a good accursed 100 minutes with a film that’s more holloween than halloween, is more that we can take.
The plot is riddled with mean bullies who treat the defenceless hero with taunting derision. Sandler, poor chap, only has his thermos flask to protect him. It’s a magical brew container, more powerful than anything else in this doddering show.