Bedtime Stories

Bedtime Stories, starring Adam Sandler, is a great example of how a sweet, simple pitch can be tugged in so many directions by competing desires that it gets ripped to shreds. The film's set-up, for example, establishes Sandler's character -- but it's boredom on a stick for any kids in the audience. And the computer-generated guinea pig will make kids laugh -- or, based on how often director Adam Shankman cuts away to it, that's the desired effect -- but it'll repel grown-ups who want the saucier, sassier Sandler they know from films like Happy Madison and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Bedtime Stories is made to have something for everyone, and winds up offering very little to anybody.

Sandler's Skeeter Bronson is a hotel handyman, but he dreams of being given a shot at running the gleaming palace built from his dad's old small hotel; hotel magnate Barry Nottingham (Richard Griffiths) seems intent on handing the keys to the kingdom to his toady second-in-command Kendall (Guy Pearce), who's also the fiancé of his Paris Hilton-esque daughter Violet (Theresa Palmer). Skeeter's divorced no-fun sister Wendy (Courtney Cox) is headed out of town for a job interview, so Skeeter is taking care of her kids Bobbi (Laura Ann Kessling) and Patrick (Jonathan Morgan Heit) on the nightshift while plucky, pretty teacher Jill (Keri Russell) deals with the day. Asked for a bedtime story, the only books Skeeter can find are stiff sermons like The Organic Squirrel Gets a Bike Helmet!, and he balks. "I am not going to read these communist stories to you." Instead, he spins a yarn about a medieval squire named Skeeter, who gets a chance to take over the kingdom and perhaps win the heart of the King's daughter.

Skeeter makes a story out of what happens in his life each night; the next day, the things the kids interjected into the story start happening in his life -- a random rain of gumballs, for example, or a kick from a dwarf. Skeeter figures he can do a little guided storytelling and make things better for himself, but while he can shape the tale, he can't control what the kids add to it. It's not a bad premise -- a little of The Princess Bride as Skeeter and the kids bond through the stories; a touch of The Monkey's Paw, as Skeeter learns he has to be careful what he tries to wish for.

But everyone in this movie -- including Russell Brand from Forgetting Sarah Marshall as Skeeter's co-worker and pal-- is better than this script. I'm not Sandler's biggest fan -- he's been bad in more films than he's been good in -- but even he shouldn't have to endure a scene where Skeeter tells his niece that miracles happen and she says "Like Dad coming back?" Bedtime Stories manages to jump from longtime Sandler collaborator Rob Schneider playing a wacky Native American to discussions of the realities of divorce, from special-effects spectacular fantasy worlds (Skeeter's stories jump from ancient times to the old West, ancient Greece to futuristic spaceships) to gratuitous child endangerment.

Trying to pull our heart strings and tickle our funny bones, Sandler (who, as star and producer, had his longtime crony Tim Herily re-write Matt Lopez's original script) and Bedtime Stories don't manage to do either terribly well. Kids won't understand Pearce's big musical number; the parents accompanying them to the theater will come to hate the comedy-relief animated guinea pig with every fiber of their being. Bedtime Stories tries to be charming and whimsical, but while charm and whimsy, like love, can be helped by great sums of money, charm and whimsy, like love, cannot be created by great sums of money. That sense of hollow spectacle makes Bedtime Stories feel forced and fake and flabby, and Sandler's need to play the best guy ever is a little obvious. The creepy finale involves us not only seeing Skeeter succeed, but also witnessing his enemies fail, so Sandler gets to both win and rub it in. With a needlessly complicated story that'll bore kids and shallow, silly jokes that'll exhaust adults, Bedtime Stories runs a real danger of living up to its name not with sweet storytelling, infinite imagination and childlike wonder but instead by putting audiences to sleep.