The Wedding Singer (1998)

A funny thing happened to the comedians who rose to prominence on Saturday Night Live: They went into the movies and became, for the most part, dumb-joke buffoons. If John Belushi was the godfather of this school, Chris Farley was its slob saint, and Sandler, most prominently in 1996's Happy Gilmore, became its new-generation id, a grinning prankster who loved smashing things because... well, he just loved smashing things. Sandler, though, has always had another side, the doofus minstrel quavering idiot ditties on Weekend Update, and in The Wedding Singer he tucks in nearly every corner of his slovenly brashness. This is a post-SNL comedy for the flush, feel-good '90s.

Speaking in a slightly slurry, gosh-gee-whiz singsong, Sandler certainly has more presence as an actor than, say, Greg Kinnear (the invisible ink of TV wiseacres-turned-movie stars), and he makes Robbie likable in a winsome, cuddly way. Yet there are no real dimensions to the character. Sandler and Barrymore, who might be playing Sandra Dee, appear to belong together not because they share any particular chemical zing but because they're like a couple of matching puppies. The very innocuousness of the love story may even be what works for audiences: It reconfigures the '80s as a decade of goofy lost innocence.

The director, Frank Coraci, establishes the Reagan era through laughably obvious signpost references: a Rubik's Cube here, a Freddy Krueger mask there, a voice from the living room yelling "I'm watching Dallas! I think J.R. may be dead or something — they shot him!" (But didn't J.R. get shot in 1980?) Mostly, Coraci slathers on the sparkly pop singles ("99 Luftballoons," "You Make My Dreams Come True," "Der Kommisar"). In essence, The Wedding Singer is a K-Tel hits package posing as a movie. Grosse Pointe Blank, with its big-'80s soundtrack, may have paved the way, but what is ultimately ushering in a film like this one is the demise of alternative rock and the reemergence of oldfangled Top 40 hookiness as the gold standard of pop pleasure. The biggest mistake The Wedding Singer makes is in not giving Sandler more songs to perform himself. The film is clearly out to exploit his success as a recording artist, but what starts as a funky Adam Sandler karaoke show, complete with his mock-tearful rendition of Madonna's "Holiday" after Robbie gets dumped, turns into the most trifling of love stories. They should have stuck with Sandler puttin' on the hits, paying homage to what you didn't know until now were the good old days. B-