Bedtime Stories not quite bedtime appropriate

By Jackie Ammons     1/8/09 6:00pm

Adam Sandler's funny but down-in-the-dumps guy routine just is not working anymore.The act may have come across as comical in The Water Boy, and Sandler got away with it in his recent film I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry because of adequate box office returns.

But in the already-horrid, newly-released film Bedtime Stories, Sandler ultimately contributes to the downfall of the movie by presenting an insincere and inconsistent character in a movie that follows an exhaustingly fast pace and is aimed at children with ridiculously short attention spans.

Bedtime Stories combines reality with fantasy as hotel maintenance man Skeeter Bronson (Sandler) tells his niece and nephew bedtime stories while their mother (The Tripper's Courteney Cox) goes out of town. Through his imaginative stories and with the help of his friend Jill (August Rush's Keri Russell) and his goofy coworker Mickey (Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Russell Brand), Skeeter is able to visualize and actualize himself moving up in the ranks of hotel management.

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But the main problem of Bedtime Stories is that it endeavors to go in too many directions in order to attract wide audiences. In doing so, the film spreads itself thin and satisfies no target audience. For example, the film attempts to be both action-packed and reflective so as to capture the short attention spans of children while still teaching them a useful life lesson.

While this idea may seem like a wholesome and effective plan, it just leaves the audience confused, as one minute they are watching a galactic fight scene, and the next minute they are watching the children discussing how sad they are that their father left them. This transition from silly to serious is abrupt and perplexing.

Sandler compounds the basic problem of Bedtime Stories by presenting a character who tries to be more complex than he really is. Sandler is known for playing the comedic character with a good heart, but the soft side of his part in Bedtime Stories is too serious. A family comedy film should not attempt to have Sandler be taken seriously, for an audience may find it difficult to seriously respect a character named Skeeter.

In spite of its failed endeavor to create a successful comedy, Bedtime Stories artfully intertwines the realms of fantasy and reality within the film to create one effective lesson. Instead of insisting that fantasy is reality - like 1995's Jumanji and 2007's Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium do - Bedtime Stories only suggests that fantasy may have an effect on reality.

In the bedtime stories he tells to his niece and nephew, Skeeter imagines himself getting the hot girl (Restraint's Teresa Palmer), and while in real life he doesn't get the hot girl, he catches the attention of the girl he deserves - his friend Jill. This sense of imagination illustrates a positive and healthy relationship between imagination and reality. Still, this one useful life lesson seems to be an accident made by the filmmakers, as Skeeter truly believes that his fantasies will become absolute realities.

Fundamentally, Bedtime Stories is too complicated for a family film. While Disney always feels the need to include a life lesson in its movies, Bedtime Stories would have been much more effective if it had taken one tone instead of two and become a straightforward slapstick comedy.

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