The Wedding Singer (1998)

Adam Sandler usually wears his hair in a bullet-like buzz cut, as if shorn for satirical battle, but in The Wedding Singer (New Line), a romantic comedy set in 1985, he's bedecked with a crown of frou-frou new-wave curls that tame and soften his features. The thrusting nose and snaggly snarl have lost their bad-seed aggressiveness. Strutting around in an electric blue blazer, he looks like the unholy offspring of Bob Dylan and Rick Springfield.

Sandler plays Robbie Hart, a once-aspiring rock star whose glory days as the spandex-clad lead singer of a band called Final Warning are behind him. Now Robbie ekes out his living as a suburban wedding singer, performing the chart-busting hits of the day in front of sloshed tuxedoed throngs. As the opening credits flash, Robbie and his band dig in to a rousing rendition of that demon-love novelty single ''You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),'' with Sandler vamping the audience on screen and off; the naked narcissism of his joy in performing is infectious. The moment Robbie steps off stage, though, he turns into a sheepish good guy, the sort of fellow who is always trying to do a noble turn (he gives singing lessons to an old lady and gets paid in meatballs!) and is destined to cheat himself out of happiness because he trusts people too much. Welcome to the new Adam Sandler: the comedian as Nice Jewish Boy.

In just a few days, Robbie will be left at the altar by his bitch-babe fiancee, who thought she was marrying a rock star instead of a glorified prom-band leader. Luckily, Robbie meets Julia (Drew Barrymore), a beautiful waitress who's as sweet and solicitous as he is, and who, like him, has gotten herself engaged to the wrong person. The movie centers on the riveting question, When will Julia figure out that her smarmy, George Michael-bearded, Miami Vice-jacketed, DeLorean-driving, junk-bond-hawking, compulsively unfaithful jerk of a fiance is unworthy of her affections? The Wedding Singer is like an Elvis movie set in a cardboard-cutout version of the mid-'80s, with a pop-rock nerd as its hero. As a romantic comedy, the picture is pleasant, predictable, and utterly weightless. Yet it has the good fortune to be one of the first of what will probably turn into a deluge of glibly packaged '80s-nostalgia flicks.

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.