The Adam Sandler comedy Grown Ups 2 is rising on Netflix’s charts. It has secured the ninth spot on the global top ten list, with a staggering 5.23million hours viewed. People really do love their mindless comedies, no matter what critics have to say about them!
Directed by Dennis Dugan and written by Fred Wolf, Tim Herlihy, and Sandler, Grown Ups 2 features a star-studded cast including Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Salma Hayek, Maya Rudolph, Maria Bello, and Nick Swardson. The film was made on an $80million budget and grossed $247m at the box office. And it was nominated for nine Razzies in 2014, including one for Worst Screen Combo for the entire cast!
Weirdly enough, the film earned Adam Sandler a ‘Favourite Movie Actor’ award at the Kid’s Choice Awards of all places.
Grown Ups 2 continues the story of Lenny and his childhood friends three years after the first film’s events. Lenny moves back to his hometown to reunite with Eric, Kurt, and Marcus, leading to more misadventures, pranks, and encounters with eccentric locals. There are deers breaking and entering homes and peeing all over, party brawls, as well as sexist and crude homophobic jokes crammed all in.
Toronto Star’s Linda Barnard, who gave the film zero stars upon release, wrote in her review, “Adam Sandler scrapes the bottom of the barrel—and then he pukes into it—with Grown Ups 2, a lazily cribbed-together swamp of pointless and unfunny sketches that makes 2010’s Grown Ups look like Citizen Kane.”
Variety’s Andrew Barker was even more savage in his takedown of Grown Ups 2, “Among the slackest, laziest, least movie-like movies released by a major studio in the last decade, Grown Ups 2 is perhaps the closest Hollywood has yet come to making ‘Ow, My Balls!’ seem like a plausible future project.”
Even then, possibilities of a third part dangle above us all. Comedian Tom Scharpling had shared an unofficial script for the threequel on Twitter in 2019. Maria Bello had also expressed her willingness to be on board if a third instalment happens, “People have talked about it and we’ve heard it might happen, but I don’t know if there is a script, I don’t know what there is. But I hope so because, boy, it’s fun to work with those guys.”
Given Sandler’s current association with Netflix, the streaming giant might get interested. Not that we want to give them any ideas.
