Movie review: 'Click' -- is there an 'awful' button?

"Click" clunks. Adam Sandler's latest effort is a clumsy, inconsistent fusion of the lowbrow comedy that made him a star and his more recent, unworkable stabs at drama in "Punch-Drunk Love" and "Spanglish."

It begins as a weak farce that's over-dependent on special effects, then restarts halfway through as a dreary sermon on the importance of family and the emptiness of material success. Even Sandler's most rabid fans might be unwilling to stick around as the gross-out humor trickles off, and the solemn life lessons, death scenes and graveyard visitations begin to mount.

The script is a crazy-quilt of themes cribbed from "A Christmas Carol,"Back to the Future" and "It's a Wonderful Life," overlaid with bathroom gags to appeal to Sandler's base. He plays Michael, a work-pressured architect without enough time for his family and office responsibilities.

He's similarly overwhelmed by the profusion of electronic gadgets in his home, accidentally activating the remote for the garage door when he means to mute the TV.

His search for a universal control brings him to the workshop of Christopher Walken, an oddball technician who has the very thing. He gives Michael a remote that can speed up, pause, rewind and subtitle everyday life, setting up a series of gags so lazy and obvious that they'd embarrass even Jay Leno.

The gadget allows Michael to skip past inconvenient obligations with his kids, wife (Kate Beckinsale) and parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner). Without familial distractions, his career improves. But the device, with its TiVo-like ability to anticipate his preferences, begins bypassing his home life entirely. Eventually it pushes him 20 years into the future, where he is at the pinnacle of his profession, but bitter, lonely, cut off from his family and swathed in unconvincing old-age makeup.

The most implausible aspect of the film isn't the magical remote, or its ability to play a commentary track on Michael's life, narrated by James Earl Jones. It's the idea that the antagonistic Michael could have married such an intelligent and gorgeous woman, raised such adoring children and remained the apple of his parents' eye.

A teenaged jerk at heart, his reaction to any annoyance is sarcasm, temper tantrums or violence. Yet at the outset, everyone in his family admires him. The film treats his sour hostility as an amusing foible, playing for laughs scenes where he freezes time, injures someone who has ticked him off, and resumes the action to enjoy their distress.

Michael is saved from being the least likable character in the film only because the writers have surrounded him with nasty neighbors, grotesque co-workers and an overbearing boss (David Hasselhoff) whose leering misogyny is even more pronounced than Michael's.

Sandler remains a subpar actor, drastically over-emoting in a heart-attack scene in which he tearfully makes amends with his family. That said, he's quite touching in a scene where he replays his final meeting with his aged father. Sandler lost his own father not long ago, and this farewell scene feels like a tribute, and a genuine moment of grief captured onscreen. It's the best, most honest moment I've ever seen in a Sandler movie. When "Click" arrives on DVD, follow the movie's example, chapter-select straight to that moment and skip the rest.

Click

* out of four stars

The setup: Time-pressured architect Michael Newman (Adam Sandler) uses a ""universal remote"" to control his life.

What works: Kate Beckinsale is fetching as Sandler's wife, who seems to spend most of her day walking around their house in her underwear.

What doesn't: The story is a failed compromise between Sandler's gross-out comedies and his unsuccessful dramas.

Great scene: A lump-in-the-throat farewell between Michael and his aged father (Henry Winkler).

Rating: PG-13 for language, crude and sex-related humor, and some drug references.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186