Starring: Adam Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jennifer Garner, Judy Greer, Dean Norris, Ansel Elgort, Kaitlyn Dever, Olivia Crocicchia, Dennis Haysbert
Directed By: Jason Reitman

Jason Reitman needs to get his shit together. He started out strong with Thank You For Smoking, following it up with a home run for Juno, into his magnum opus Up In The Air, and then just… started farting movies out. Young Adult was OK, but considering his first three films, it was a huge letdown. Labor Day left audiences wanting more, and now Men Women and Children. To be fair, I didn’t think this movie was terrible, but what little I did enjoy about the film had very little to do with Reitman’s direction.

The film could have been an interesting look at sex in suburbia, and the varying degrees of it among a random collection of adults and teens. Instead, we get some weird narration that begins in space, as if to suggest this story is somehow “bigger than itself”, which leads us to a sleepwalking Adam Sandler, who is addicted to porn, and later hookers and cheating on his wife. His wife (Dewitt) signs up for Ashley Madison (which apparently is not just a site designed to give you malware, but will actually hook you up with someone), and meets tall dark and handsome (Haysbert) for some fun. Another suburban housewife (Garner) is cartoonishly overprotective of her teenage daughter (Dever), to the point of her reading all off her online activity in detailed printouts. Yes, she actually prints out on real sheets of paper the online activity of her daughter. She defriends people for her daughter on facebook that she deems “unsavory”, and generally is the most overbearing person ever. Her husband’s reaction to this? Well, he’s barely shown, and when he is, he basically just shrugs his shoulders.

Judy Greer is given the creepy task of taking sexually suggestive photos of her daughter (Crocicchia) for “modeling purposes”. The only normal adult is played by Dean Norris, whose big character arc is that his wife recently left him and his son (Elgort) quit the football team and started playing Guild Wars. The film is a more interesting look at how kids are reacting to sex nowadays than how adults are. And for a film with a pretty equally balanced cast of adults and teens, I was actually really surprised that none of the adults and teens intersected romantically. Some of these characters could have used a darker timeline than they had, showing their character spiraling out of control by finally sleeping with their daughters friend, or whatever. Sandler’s arc is such a massive waste of time that I kept expecting him to fuck a teenager, but he never did, so it just felt incredibly pointless. Guys like porn. We don’t make a whole movie about a guy who likes porn.

I suppose the reason the critics hate this film has a lot to do with the fact that it seems pointless, and empty. No character is ever completely beyond redemption, except perhaps Jennifer Garner, whose cheesy villain could easily be swapped in as the bad guy in an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. She’s so over the top, that when her character basically is responsible for the near-death of another person, it just seems like the 18th cherry on top of your sundae. You’re good. You don’t need any more. We could have stopped a long time ago.

Not all is bad. Dean Norris is actually really good here, as a good guy dealt a bad hand, and just trying to move forward. Ansel Elgort is really good at being depressed, and Olivia Crocicchia plays her role with such strong sexual undertones that you feel like she’s auditioning to be Scarlett Johansson. She’s very good at doing the “look at me” thing, and drawing attention to herself.

Was it an absolutely awful film? No, not really. It was just a fairly pointless and tame effort from Reitman, who has shown us that he was capable of so much more. I suppose if this was a Uwe Boll movie, I would write a review about how far Uwe has come as a filmmaker, and praise him for finally choosing “actors”, and making a fairly coherent film for once. But this is not a Uwe Boll film. This is a film from the guy who did Up In The Air. Because of that, I expected more.

FINAL GRADE: C+