Adam Sandler: 5 Family-Friendly Movies (& 5 Surprisingly Dark Ones)

Funnyman Adam Sandler knows how to crack up kids and parents alike with his goofy comedies. But the versatile actor can show range in darker fare too.

You Are Reading :Adam Sandler 5 FamilyFriendly Movies (& 5 Surprisingly Dark Ones)

Adam Sandler is one of the most beloved movie stars in the world. His recent efforts for Netflix have been very hit-or-miss, but they’ve all ranked among the streaming service’s most-viewed originals. Fans can’t get enough of Sandler. Over the course of his storied decades-long career, he’s proven that he has a wide range of talents.

Being funny is one thing, but Sandler’s comedic talents go the extra mile; he’s appeared in both lighthearted family-oriented fare and darkly comic projects aimed squarely at an adult audience. He’s also starred in a handful of dramas, digging into real human emotions and connecting with the audience.

10 Family-Friendly: Hotel Transylvania

What if Count Dracula ran a hotel where supernatural creatures could get away from it all and enjoy a vacation? That’s the juicy premise at the heart of Adam Sandler’s Hotel Transylvania franchise. These movies could’ve sucked — no pun intended — but in the hands of animation legend Genndy Tartakovsky, they’re surprisingly delightful.

Sandler and his regular roster of cohorts voice classic Universal Monsters characters — Sandler as Dracula, Kevin James as Frankenstein’s monster, David Spade as Griffin the invisible man etc. — and they all give hilarious performances.

9 Surprisingly Dark: That’s My Boy

Andy Samberg ranks Adam Sandler among his idols, and the two proved to have pretty great on-screen chemistry in the movie That’s My Boy. Opening with a joke about statutory rape and closing with a joke about incest, That’s My Boy has its feet firmly planted in the territory of pitch-black comedy.

Samberg plays Sandler’s son who wants nothing to do with him. The plot takes off when Sandler crashes his son’s wedding weekend with an ulterior motive. It’s not a perfect movie but it has its moments.

8 Family-Friendly: Grown Ups

Starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider, Grown Ups has been lambasted as a transparent excuse for Sandler to spend a summer vacationing with his friends and get paid millions of dollars for it. Still, it’s hard to blame him for taking that deal.

The sequel is out-and-out terrible, but the first one has an easygoing energy and a handful of solid laughs that make it worthwhile.

7 Surprisingly Dark: Punch-Drunk Love

After Magnolia was released and Paul Thomas Anderson told a room full of film journalists that he wanted his next film to star Adam Sandler, they thought he was joking.

But lo and behold, Anderson’s next movie, Punch-Drunk Love, starred Sandler as a lovesick loner with serious emotional issues. It was both one of the director’s best films and one of Sandler’s best performances.

6 Family-Friendly: Pixels

When aliens send recreations of Earth’s most popular video games to attack humankind, the world’s best gamers (one of whom is now the President of the United States, played by Kevin James) are recruited to fight back.

Pixels is hardly La Dolce Vita, or even Ghostbusters, but it has its moments. Peter Dinklage gives a strong supporting turn alongside Sandler and James.

5 Surprisingly Dark: Funny People

Adam Sandler turned down Quentin Tarantino’s offer to play the Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds in order to play a washed-up comedian who takes stock of his life when he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness in his old roommate Judd Apatow’s two-and-a-half-hour dramedy Funny People.

The movie drags on a little when its focus on L.A. and show business is thrown out the window so Apatow can cram his wife and kids into the story, but on the whole, Sandler gives a great performance and it’s a touching movie.

4 Family-Friendly: Blended

In their third and by far least successful on-screen team-up, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore made a family comedy. They play single parents who strike up a relationship and take their kids away for a big family vacation where they all have to learn to get along.

The intention here was to normalize blended families, which is a great idea that has since caught on, but it’s just a shame that the actual movie couldn’t live up to its good intentions.

3 Surprisingly Dark: Uncut Gems

Last year, Adam Sandler was severely snubbed for an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. His performance as unscrupulous jewelry dealer Howard Ratner in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems was endlessly compelling.

Sandler really draws the viewer into Howard’s skewed mindset, while the movie as a whole is such an effective thriller that it’s commonly described as a two-hour anxiety attack.

2 Family-Friendly: Bedtime Stories

In Adam Sandler’s first appearance in a full-on family film — and his first starring role in a Disney movie — he plays a hotel handyman who tells bedtime stories to his niece and nephew, whose wondrous stories about chariot races and raining gumballs magically start to come true. Some of the humor is a little juvenile for adults to enjoy, but kids love it.

1 Surprisingly Dark: Little Nicky

It’s common for a comedy superstar’s first box office bomb to be a dark comedy. Jim Carrey’s string of cinematic hits was broken by the failure of The Cable Guy. After playing a hothead golfer, a wedding singer, and a grown man in elementary school in a series of hit movies, Adam Sandler finally bombed at the box office when he played the son of the Devil.

Little Nicky is a really underrated movie. It’s great to see an early-career Sandler tackle such challenging subject matter, and Harvey Keitel makes for a hilarious Satan.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/adam-sandler-most-family-friendly-darkest-movies/