![]() " No daddy, no!" screams the jock as his dad beats him with a belt and the scene cuts away, echoing the chillingly funny " people to kill" scene from Billy Madison. Later, the player calls Deeds back and apologizes while his physically abusive father lurks menacingly in the background. The story has a handful of these odd detours, like when a cocky football star who plays for the Jets, a team Deeds now owns, arrives out of nowhere to renegotiate his contract and promptly gets punched out by Deeds for using foul language. One one hand, Mandrake Falls is presented as idyllic, an old-fashioned community centered around a local pizza place, but it's also a little disturbed, a town where a random guy pretending to be a cop shows up to drink a beer and listen to another man read a greeting card in the middle of the day. The tonal precarity that irritated critics like Roger Ebert, who noted that the movie "breaks the mood with absurdly inappropriate 'comedy' scenes," is actually what makes Mr. ![]() ![]() In multiple scenes, Deeds deals with the condescension of the rich and the mockery of cultural elites, like an opera singer and a New Yorker writer, by behaving like many Adam Sandler protagonists: He beats them up in big bursts of cartoon-like mayhem. Deeds follows Longfellow Deeds (Sandler here Gary Cooper in the original) as he discovers he's the heir to a $40 billion dollar fortune from a distant relative and gets whisked away from his quaint New Hampshire home of Mandrake Falls to the mean streets of New York, where he must contend with a scheming tabloid reporter posing as a naif (Winona Ryder) at the behest of her slimy editor (a mustachioed Jared Harris) and a backstabbing business colleague posing as a friend (Peter Gallagher). If you don't have the plot details etched in your brain from cable viewings, Mr. Deeds highlight the movie's simultaneously sentimental and rude tone, particularly the way the simple premise, drawn from the Capra film, often chafes against the violent impulses of Sandler's comedy. Though it has a dismal critical reputation - 22% on Rotten Tomatoes and three nominations at the Razzie Awards - this proudly goofy remake of a 1936 Frank Capra film remains one of Sandler's most underrated comedies, packed with stupid sight gags ( the frostbitten foot!) and funny lines (" Genius genius genius!"), and, viewed from the present moment, it's a curious example of the actor's surprising durability as a mainstream movie star. ![]() Deeds, drops on the service and immediately draws attention from bored scrollers who recognize the younger mug of one of the service's marquee stars. So, it's not surprising when a "new" old Sandler movie, like 2002's Mr. Even his most recent non-Netflix-produced vehicle, the Safdie Brothers' abrasive gambling drama Uncut Gems, found a home on the streaming service after its theatrical release in America last year. Besides the five movies released as part of a lucrative multi-film deal with his production outfit Happy Madison, he's also starred in a "serious" Noah Baumbach movie ( The Meyerowitz Stories) for the company, released his most recent stand-up special on it, and produced a couple of titles featuring his old SNL pal David Spade. Since the 2015 release of the cowpoke comedy The Ridiculous 6, Adam Sandler has tamed the wild west of Netflix. ![]()
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