The movie is being sold as a comedy, but you know what? This isn't funny. Yes, there are some laughs, as when he finds he can turn the dog's barking up and down, or play around with the settings for hue and contrast, or when he discovers the picture-in-picture feature that allows him to watch the ballgame no matter what else is going on around him. But the movie essentially involves a workaholic who uses the universal remote to skip over all the bad stuff in his life and discovers in the process that he is missing life itself. Take away the gimmick of the universal remote, and this is what a lot of us do, and it's sad.
It's not just sad, it's brutal. There's an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device. He turns off the volume during an argument with his wife. He fast-forwards through a boring family dinner, and later through foreplay. He skips ahead to avoid a bad cold. He jumps to the chapter where he gets a promotion. Eventually, he realizes the family dog has died and been replaced by another, his kids have grown up, his wife is married to someone else, and he weighs 400 pounds. It happened while he wasn't paying attention.
Like many other Sandler movies, this one lingers studiously over bodily functions. After losing enormous amount of weight, for example, Michael plays with a big flap of loose skin around his stomach, plopping it up and down long after any possible audience curiosity has been satisfied. During an argument with his boss (David Hasselhoff), he freeze-frames the boss, jumps on his desk and farts. When he puts his boss back on "play," the boss inexplicably decides his secretary has put feces in his salad. Anyone who can't tell poop from lettuce doesn't deserve to be a senior partner. They teach you that in business school.
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