JUST GO WITH IT (Blu-ray; Sony Pictures/Happy Madison Productions)

Releasing Studio: Sony Pictures (Happy Madison Productions)
Disc/Transfer Specifications: 1080p 1.85:1; Region 1 (U.S.) Release
Video Codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Tested Audio Track: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Rating: PG-13
Director: Dennis Dugan
Starring Cast: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, Brooklyn Decker


SOMETIMES A GUY’S BEST WINGMAN…IS A WINGWOMAN.


OSAGE’S PLOT ANALYSIS:

Let’s put this typical Adam Sandler-is-the-geeky-Jewish-kid-who-grows-up-to-be-the-ultimate-ladies-man satire aside for a second – holy cow, is the outrageously beautiful Brooklyn Decker gorgeous in this. As an American fashion model who has appeared in a layout within the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, this girl is spreading her acting wings a bit playing opposite the always-chasing-hot-gals Adam Sandler. In fact, I couldn’t figure out who was prettiest in this film – Jen Aniston, who looked as delicious as ever in certain sequences and outfits, Decker or even Nicole Kidman, who was strutting her stuff in fashionable high heels and trendy outfits all over the place.

To be honest, I was growing a little tired of Sandler’s last few performances, and I have commented about this in previous, multiple reviews – I mean, this guy just plays the exact same role, the exact same way, with the exact same underlying themes of needing to hook up with the prettiest chicks after enduring a childhood of torment and teasing due to his unsightly looks as a kid, yadda yadda yadda. In Dennis Dugan’s Just Go With It, Sandler plays a successful plastic surgeon performing corrective breast and brow jobs for his snobby clients, while Aniston plays his assistant in the office. The film opens with one of those typical flashbacks so prevalent in Sandler’s films – which are routinely churned out by his own Happy Madison production house – which depicts a younger Sandler about to get married circa 1988 in Long Island, New York, and I gotta tell ya…the shoddy makeup work here was atrocious. Sandler is portrayed as a curly-fro'ed, massive-nosed buffoon, made even more laughable by his idiotic cousin who is riddled with pimples and comes off as the dork of all dorks. In the bridal suite, his wife to be is getting ready, finishing up touches on her dress and veil, while her snotty Long Island friends assist her and gab with her about the steps she’s about to take with Sandler’s character – Sandler, with a massively huge phony nose on, playing a younger version of himself at this point, is listening in to the girls’ conversations from outside the door, when he overhears his bride saying that she is pretty much marrying him for security and money. With tears streaming down his pock-marked mug, Sandler’s character begins to narrate the story for us, and suddenly we’re in the present time, where he’s a successful plastic surgeon (I believe somewhere in L.A.).

There’s an underlying theme here of Sandler – after some quick flashbacks prior to the film entering the present day of him sleeping with several attractive girls throughout college, still keeping his wedding ring on – not being able to marry again, but yet uses the ring to get chicks into bed, throughout the beginning of Just Go With It; I suppose you have to just…well…go with it. The plot soon reveals itself, in which Sandler’s character, in the present day, throws a house party on the beach and meets the gorgeous Decker, even amidst all the fake boob jobs walking around his pad that he’s worked on. The two of them spend the night on the beach, and when the morning comes, Decker reaches for Sandler’s pants so he can put them on – but she finds his wedding ring from all those years before in one of his pockets, instantly alarming her that this guy is married. Claiming that he isn’t, Sandler quickly cooks up a story about being separated from a “wife” and brings Aniston into his scheme of trying to prove to Decker that he isn’t still into his “wife.” Aniston, who up to this point was a rather haphazard, frumpy dresser in Sandler’s office, visits some Rodeo Drive shops and gets decked out in the most revealing of outfits, to pretend she’s Sandler’s soon-to-be-ex – and wow, does Jen look great in this scene. Sandler has set the scenario up so that Decker can meet the “wife” (Aniston) and try and figure out if Sandler is full of hogwash – but as Aniston walks (in slow motion technique in the filming) in her teasingly cute outfit towards the two of them, Decker exclaims ”Is that HER?” while Sandler can’t believe what he’s seeing. His once frumpy, glasses-wearing assistant is sashaying towards them in an ensemble that would make a blind man discover his vision – and of course, Sandler’s character begins to fall for Aniston’s instead of Decker’s. Like we couldn’t see that coming.

Anyway, eventually Aniston’s two kids are brought into the picture, after she slips and mentions that she and Sandler had kids from their marriage, and so now, the children must play a part in this whole made up story – Aniston’s daughter, an annoying little tart that insists on speaking in thick British accents just to tick people off courtesy of her acting lessons, promises to pretend to be Sandler’s daughter, while her son – a depressed-looking, miserable little brat – blackmails Sandler into taking him to Hawaii to “swim with the dolphins” in exchange for pretending to be his son. Meanwhile, Sandler’s moronic cousin from the opening wedding sequence is along for the ride too, pretending to be “Dolph Lundgren,” Aniston’s new love interest since moving on past Sandler. The two couples and the kids fly to Hawaii – on Sandler’s dime if this wasn’t enough – and of course, hijinks ensue once there. One evening at their resort, Aniston runs into an old sorority sister of hers from her college days (played by Nicole Kidman who has miraculously lost her UK accent in this) and her self-centered, imbecilic husband. Like we’ve seen before in these kinds of comedies, a competition of sorts breaks out between the women, where during a hula girl competition one night, the two of them shake their behinds to win and out-do the other, no matter how ridiculous they make themselves look. Whatever.

As the trip progresses, Sandler and Aniston realize the feelings they have for one another, but this kind of narrative is just sooooo predictable and tiring already; of course we knew that Sandler’s character and Aniston’s were going to end up together. Sandler really needs to either remove himself from this game or just get behind the scenes more for his Happy Madison studio – his “comedies” are really getting long in the tooth, and the clichéd, overwrought “ladies man in the faded T-shirts and baseball hats” characters are just plain annoying already. I mean, we get it – it’s these types of unattractive, disheveled boneheads who always get the most beautiful of girls everywhere they go, and we’ll just never know why…but must it be constantly commercialized and sensationalized in every one of these modern day comedies?

VIDEO QUALITY ANALYSIS:

Sony Pictures presents Just Go With It in a typically clean, detail rich 1.85:1 1080p transfer which filled my screen sans letterboxing. The opening flashback wedding sequence featuring Sandler and his massive, fake honker amidst the backdrop of a Long Island temple in 1988 looked fantastically high-def, with the foliage outside the temple jumping with detail and dimension, as well as overall detail all around. When the action shifts to the beaches of Hawaii, the transfer looks absolutely stunning – as it did on Universal’s Blu-ray transfer of Couples Retreat – with bold, brash colors, remarkable clarity and an almost surreal dimensionality. I did note – not only in this film but others on Blu – that the greens of grass, during golf course or other sequences, looked very unrealistic in terms of hue and shade…one sequence in particular, when Sandler’s character is on a golf course at their Hawaiian resort with Aniston’s kids, looked especially unnatural, where the grass of the course was glowing an almost neon green. As suddenly as this scene came, another shot right on top of it switched back to a more natural-looking grass hue – now, this may very well be the “issue” some of the newer HDTV displays have had with dealing with primary hues like green, in which the color appears blown out and a bit inaccurate; this is normally corrected in service menus of displays, with professional calibration of white balance controls and such, but my set is calibrated in a “Standard” picture mode, for as much accuracy as possible within the limits of that mode. For 99.9-percent of viewing and reviewing, this mode renders the image absolutely accurate – in this particular case, with the Just Go With It Blu-ray, my set may have been exaggerating certain colors such as green. But it’s really nit picking.

AUDIO QUALITY ANALYSIS:

Nothing really going on here; as is typical for this genre of film, Just Go With It’s English DTS-HD Master Audio track in 5.1 isn’t exciting in any one place – or in any place. Dialogue is rendered acceptably, but there was one, from what I recall, brief moment of surround activity and back support, in which the rear soundstage was utilized to suggest ambient cues on a beach or elsewhere…but aside from that, nothing was memorable here.