“Big Daddy”

TWO STARS

In a short 10 years, Adam Sandler has gone from being that dude with the weird voices on Remote Control to one of the biggest box office draws in the country.

However, if Sandler wants to remain at the top, he’s going to have to do better than “Big Daddy.”

Sandler plays 32-year-old Sonny Koufax, a law school graduate who only works one day a week at a tollbooth.

Koufax’s lack of initiative garners him disdain from his lawyer father, and causes his girlfriend Vanessa (Kristy Swanson) to leave him.

Koufax lives with an old law school buddy, Kevin (Jon Stewart), who now works at a law firm. Unlike Koufax, his friends have made the transition into adulthood, as evidenced at a surprise party for Kevin.

Kevin uses the party as a forum to propose to long time girlfriend Corinne (Leslie Mann), and Koufax makes a mockery of the situation.

The next morning, after Kevin has left on a trip to China, a young boy (twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse) shows up at the door of the apartment. A note the boy has with him claims he is Kevin’s son.

Since it is Columbus Day and the child services office is closed, Koufax decides to take care of the boy for the day. He soon realizes that caring for a child may convince Vanessa that he can handle responsibility after all.

The plan backfires when Koufax goes to Vanessa’s apartment only to find she is shacking up with a 60-year-old man. She sights the man’s experience and his “five-year-plan” as the main reasons she is attracted to him.

Koufax initially intends to return the boy to child services, but soon decides he wants to keep the kid himself. He also falls for Corrine’s sister Layla (Joey Lauren Adams), a hard-working attorney in her own right.

“Big Daddy” really never gives the audience anything to sink its teeth into.

Sandler’s previous films can be grouped into two fairly distinct categories.

“Billy Madison,” “Happy Gilmore,” and the less enjoyable “The Waterboy” highlighted Sandler’s talents at writing unusual caricatures and absurd situations.

On “The Wedding Singer” Sandler made a nice change of pace by building the story around more realistic characters with whom the audience could identify.

In “Big Daddy,” Sandler falls into some kind of a middle ground that just doesn’t work. While the main characters are very realistic, the film is also filled with more bizzare characters who don’t quite fit. Among these are Steve Buscemi as “Homeless Guy” and Rob Schneider as a vaguely-Eastern European delivery boy.

While those characters may work in and of themselves, they clash with the rest of the movie.

In a snooze of a courtroom scene, the camera cuts from a sentimental moment between Sandler and his father to Buscemi eating cantalope for no appareant reason. The joke may be funny, but it completely undermines the rest of the scene.

The sentimentality throughout “Big Daddy” is on high. Every time Sandler and the little boy share a touching moment, there is an extremely loud orchestral swell, as if the audience is too stupid to know when to engage their emotions without a musical cue.

Speaking of music, there are a few serious mistakes in the film. The most obvious is featuring a Sheryl Crow cover of Guns n’ Roses “Sweet Child of Mine.”

The other is that Sandler’s character is a big Styx fan. Now some things are funny as a joke, but let’s be honest, Styx just plain sucks.

At times, “Big Daddy” comes close to touching on an interesting idea but seems afraid to proceed. All of the male characters in the film reflect on the suppression they felt from their fathers, but none of them go into any depth.

It is also unusual that at the beginning of the film we are supposed to dislike the way Koufax’s friends spend their lives at work, but by the end of the film we’re supposed to believe that selling out to corporate America is the only way to go.

“Big Daddy” contains its share of good and bad performances. Buscemi is hilarious, and Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy) is as engaging as ever.

On the other hand, it really is time that somebody put Rob Schneider down. His delivery boy character is a pitiful attempt at Andy Kaufman’s characterization of a foreign man, as well as Latka from “Taxi.”

“Big Daddy” contains a few good laughs, but for the most part it is just an awkward rehash of about a hundred other movies.