As the tenured Director of Socioeconomic Analysis (South Asia region) at the RAND Corporation, I was too smart to properly assess the artistic credence of Adam Sandler’s latest assault on human intelligence and morality. But I take these reviews very seriously, so I followed the proper steps to attain the requisite mindset before stepping into the theater alongside what I presume is an audience composed exclusively of welfare recipients.

Firstly, I quit my prestigious job, politely refusing the six months’ severance pay, as well as waiving my right to continued health benefits. My wife was initially furious, but then showed her support for DuelingChaps.com by complying with my request for her to gain 15 pounds, as well as to wear undersized spaghetti-strap tops to show off the new tattoo between her shoulder blades of Jefferson Davis flipping the bird to Abe Lincoln. My kids weren’t all that pleased either, but I just can’t pay their college tuition when my sole source of income is derived from participating in internet surveys. I actually could have continued to make the minimum payments, but I really wanted the slightly used ’05 Ford F-350 with a rear window emblem of Davey Crockett standing with a lit match next to empty barrels as he looks down upon the Rio Grande, full of spilled oil and Mexicans pleading with him not to do what he’s going to do.

Opening day of Grown Ups 2 represented the culmination of months of preparation, with the final step being my failure of the GED exam that same morning. I walked into the theater donned in the necessary attire for any fan of a Happy Madison film: sandals, sweatpants with the drawstring hanging out front, a wife-beater, and a beer helmet stock full of Natty Light. So here it is, without further ado, the DuelingChaps.com review of Grown Ups 2.

It sucks. Though to be fair, credit Happy Madison with pulling off the ultimate addition by subtraction with the dropping of Rob Schneider from the cast. He may have been the screen time leader in Grown Ups, yet his character is not even mentioned in 2. I did hear through the grapevine though that Schneider had prior acting commitments alongside Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood! Part Deux, so we’ll excuse his absence.

Another notable improvement held by the second installment over the first is that it actually contains competent one-liners. The original exclusively contained jokes so obvious that comprehending them required no more brain power than is used during passive environment scanning. It was as if the entire film was devised as a basic tutorial on humor to be distributed to non-English speaking foreigners. In Grown Ups 2, there are jokes that at least require a general understanding of the cultural milieu and the ability to jive disparate ideas. This is just a point of comparison between the two films; don’t confuse it with praise. The competent jokes in Grown Ups 2 would have likely been written out by the second draft of any real movie. To save you the potential remorse of actually spending money to see this film, I’ll just give you the best line in the whole thing: Sandler (playing a Hollywood agent) and friends approach Tim Meadows, who is working in a K-Mart. Meadows then states, “Well, if it isn’t Hollywood and the squares.” This is the height of comedy in this film.

The best word to describe the entirety of the Grown Ups 2 experience is “odd”. The whole thing is slightly off-kilter. Major plot points are either glossed over or never addressed, but it doesn’t seem like a mistake or even laziness, but rather an intentional decision to leave gaping holes in the film’s logic. This is evident from the very first utterance, when Sandler awakes to find a deer standing over his bed. He comments to his wife (Salma Hayek) that it looks like her mother is in town. What does that mean? Is Sandler just woozy cuz it’s early in the morning? Is he commenting on the physical appearance of his mother-in-law? Her demeanor? Does she run a venison packing plant? You can’t use the arbitrary comedic device of a urinating deer as commentary on a specific character of which the audience knows nothing about. The deer then goes on a rampage through the house, until it is shooed out the front door. The scene doesn’t end here though, but rather concludes with the mailman hugging each of Sandler’s family members for no apparent reason. Are we meant to somehow associate the deer with the affable mailman? Unclear.

The movie follows Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Kevin James as they drive a school bus (obviously) to random locations. (These are four employed men on a random weekday in June, by the way.) At some point, the word “party” gets mentioned in a sentence, and they use that as a jumping off point to organize a massive house party for that night, which the whole town manages to attend with less than 2.5 hours notice. That’s the whole movie. There was nothing significant about the day when they woke up, yet Sandler and Friends felt a risen sun was more than enough reason to shirk their responsibilities and go nuts, with the rest of the cast of characters arriving at the same conclusion around 3 pm.

Grown Ups 2 has some of the most weirdly executed scenes you’ll ever see. Early on, Sandler and his kids (or some random kids… it doesn’t matter) are waiting at the bus stop. They make a few charming yet failed attempts at father-children humor, they laugh, and then one of the characters makes a little comment to wrap up the dialogue. But then the strangest thing happens; the scene keeps going. While every other movie would have used the slightly elongated quiet pause after said final comment as the cut point, Grown Ups 2 keeps on truckin’. For the next five minutes, they run through several more complete conversations, or another random character pops in, and Sandler converses with that guy for a little bit. This goes on throughout, and they somehow manage to spend eight minutes walking through random aisles in K-Mart. In case there are retards reading this that are actually interested in the ending, I won’t spoil it for you, but the “climactic” finale is the worst way-too-long-scene offender.

Colin Quinn portrays an ice scream stand attendant. At some point in the film, he needs to repair the ice cream machine. In order to do this, he stands on top of the machine, and presses a button that forces the chocolate ice cream to dispense. It thus appears to anyone standing behind him that he is pooping…

I worry that when the apocalypse strikes, a digital copy of Grown Ups 2 may survive and serve as the only evidence of human existence to the next custodians of the planet. We may get lucky and have a copy of S.F.W. survive, but I’m not counting on it. Then again, maybe Grown Ups 2 is an appropriate legacy for the human race. We’ve achieved such prosperity that the sight of frozen treats being ejected from a man’s anus without him even consuming it to attain its nutrients is deemed comedy, and not tragedy. You therefore must see this movie, if for no reason other than to appreciate all of the good things and good creeds that our ancestors fought to provide for us, only to see them crapped out in the span of a single Happy Madison flick.