usatoday.com
When it comes to holiday tales, it would be best to reread The Night Before Christmas rather than waste time or money on Bedtime Stories.
Adam Sandler's latest feels as if it's barely going through the motions. Sandler is reasonably likable, but the only actor who is somewhat lively in a cast of substantial actors with small roles is British comedian Russell Brand (Forgetting Sarah Marshall).
The fantasy segments, played up in trailers, get bogged down amid the ho-hum tale of a loser making good.
That loser is Sandler's Skeeter, a hotel handyman who grew up in a homey motel owned by his father (Jonathan Pryce) until it was sold to a high-stakes businessman cut from Hilton cloth (Richard Griffiths), who turned it into a luxury hotel.
Skeeter must watch his niece and nephew while his sister (Courteney Cox) is out of town. Clueless about what to do with them, he tells stories — and eventually discovers that the tales possess more power than mere escapist fantasies.
For some reason, he barely knows these kids — though they live in the same city. It's explained lamely that Wendy's ex-husband didn't like Skeeter, so he wasn't welcome at their home.
It's not difficult to imagine someone not being a fan of Skeeter's: He comes across like an annoying overgrown kid — just another variation of Sandler's standard goofy, boyish Everydoofus. But since he's the star of the movie, we're supposed to root for him in a contest established to manage a new hotel.
Skeeter's love life evolves in similar movieland cliché. He shares babysitting duties with Wendy's friend Jill (Keri Russell), who takes an instant dislike to him. So it's obvious they are destined to fall madly in love.
While the fairy-tale scenarios have some entertaining moments, don't expect anything as involving as The Princess Bride or the more recent, offbeat The Fall. Both offered far more imaginative takes on stories coming to vivid life.
about.com
Bedtime Stories is a kid-friendly Adam Sandler comedy that's going to make preteens giggle and make adults wish they were anywhere else but in a theater watching this dopey movie. Sandler knows what tickles kids' funny bones and with Bedtime Stories he aims to please the younger set while obviously not caring one bit about the torture he's forcing adults to endure.
Bedtime Stories is Adam Sandler doing Adam Sandler. Every facial contortion and grumbly mumbly dialect from past Sandler pics is put into play again in Bedtime Stories. There's a lot of recycled Sandler bits in this obnoxiously goofy message movie, gags and voices that worked much better the first time around.
The 2006 holiday movie season served up Night at the Museum, and that Ben Stiller comedy became a huge blockbuster earning $42 million its opening weekend and $571 million worldwide before heading out of theaters. Compared to Bedtime Stories, Night at the Museum is a masterpiece. 2007's big family holiday comedy was Alvin and the Chipmunks starring Alvin, Theodore, Simon, and Jason Lee. I'd take listening to bad rap performed by animated animals over Sandler's latest comedy any day of the week.
nytimes.com
Adam Sandler is at that difficult age. Now 42, he's too old to continue with the bungling, man-child shtick of yore, yet too young to transition to old-fogey infantilism. In "Bedtime Stories" the pain of this artistic limbo is written all over his character, a resentful hotel handyman named Skeeter. Astonishingly, his name is not the source of his umbrage.
Skeeter's pique (though he may not know it) is reserved for his dead father, an inept businessman whose cozy motel once occupied the lot where Skeeter's current employer has erected an upscale resort. Gone, along with the homespun vibe, is Skeeter's dream of one day running the property; so when his divorced sister, Wendy (a frighteningly taut Courteney Cox), asks him to baby-sit for his young niece and nephew (Laura Ann Kesling and Jonathan Morgan Heit) for a few days, Skeeter is in no mood to play scallywag uncle.
"I don't believe in happy endings," he tells his incredulous charges when story time comes around. Luckily for the tykes, their director, Adam Shankman, loves them, the happier the better. (Even as a guest judge on "So You Think You Can Dance" Mr. Shankman, a popular choreographer, squirmed mightily to avoid delivering a bad critique.)
Rolling up his sleeves and piling on the digital effects, he labors to whip life into a screenplay (by Matt Lopez and Tim Herlihy) so tired even Bugsy, the children’s pop-eyed guinea pig, is moved to tuck himself into bed.
But Mr. Shankman is not one to give up without a fight. And as the children concoct their own stories, Skeeter and the rest of the cast are dragged through a variety of threadbare fantasies — an Old West showdown, a medieval joust, a chariot race in ancient Greece — in which Skeeter inevitably bests the villain and bags the girl. The adorable Keri Russell, as the unfortunate target of Skeeter's passive-aggressive affections, is the movie's soft center and sole pleasure: a locus of calm in a sea of turmoil.
Faring less well are performers whose tenure in children's entertainment will, I hope, be brief, including Lucy Lawless as a brittle desk clerk and Russell Brand as Skeeter's fuzzily written best friend. And if there were an Oscar for miscasting, Guy Pearce's atrocious turn as the hotel's pompous manager would be a lock. Mugging beneath a horrendous coif, he makes Basil Fawlty look like a paragon of restraint.
Almost everyone leaves blood on the floor, but "Bedtime Stories" refuses to be juiced; soured by its enervated star and uninspired writing, the movie offers only tiny moments of joy, like a hailstorm of gumballs that’s unexpectedly magical.
Clearly, pushing Skeeter's broom doesn't agree with Mr. Sandler, who seems impatient with immaturity and anxious to grow up. He was much happier selling novelty toilet plungers in "Punch-Drunk Love," but the director of that movie, Paul Thomas Anderson, recognized his star's natural inner rage and how to tap into it, encouraging a revelatory performance unlike anything on his résumé.
If Mr. Sandler hopes to shift smoothly into more mature roles (as indicated by last year's "Reign Over Me"), he needs directors who understand his uncommon gifts. The toilet plungers are optional.
"Bedtime Stories" is rated PG (Parental Guidance suggested). Stampeding horses, angry dwarves and a Booger Monster.