THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

Adam Sandler dusts off the 9-iron for a sequel that few asked for but plenty will click on anyway. Sandler is doing Netflix a solid—a movie I’m sure made millions of its subscribers feel slightly better about the latest price hike. Nostalgia is the hook here. All the better if it comes with a smorgasbord of broadly staged pratfalls, low-hanging beer guts, and sports-centric rage.

The original Happy Gilmore wasn’t exactly precision comedy. But it was loud and strange, and perhaps most importantly it stuck with you. This sequel is looser and flabbier. It seems almost as if it’s proud of how little it cares about developing its own narrative. It has a bare-bones plot, but it mostly serves as a frame through which a shuffling Rolodex takes us through a roll call of cameos and callbacks—both living and dead. They appear, dutifully set themselves up for an efficient punchline, and then quickly clear the stage for the next one.

The film opens catching us up. Happy (Sandler) got married to Virginia (Julie Bowen), had kids, and briefly tried out adulthood. It seemed to be going well until a freak golfing accident kills Virginia. Devastated, he plunges into tabloid infamy and full-time alcoholism. Next, of course, comes the inevitable redemption arc. And while most movies wouldn’t depict a character smashing windows and barking at opponents as character improvement, it does here—especially when combined with showing off that wicked backswing.

It’s not as funny as the original, but that’s no surprise, and the movie seems fully aware of it anyway. There are enough laughs to make this worthwhile, but they only come in fits and starts. There’s an occasional line that lands, a visual gag that’ll make you strike a smile, or a particularly surprising cameo. But as with many of Sandler’s comedies, too many jokes feel lazy. And the handful that work remind you of why the original film stuck in the culture in the first place. For anyone who grew up on Sandler yelling at golf balls and punching Bob Barker, this might just hit your sweet spot. It’s hardly a movie you need, and you might not remember it tomorrow, but for two hours it feels almost like 1996 again.

The Beatles already get the wind knocked out of them before the opening credits are even through. All four of them are sprinting down a London street, chased by a tidal wave of shrieking girls, tripping over curbs, trying to slip past them in disguises. They barely survive. Then from there, the quartet tumble onto a train car. They’re on their way—ostensibly—to do a live television broadcast. But they take more detours than appointments on the way.

We don’t get so much a story here as a loosely fastened excuse to watch Britain’s most famous four-piece tumble through a day’s worth of obligations, diversions, sound checks, misdirection, and prankster detours. And through all of this, they somehow got roped into keeping an eye on Paul’s grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell)—a gleeful saboteur with a gift for wandering off at exactly the wrong moment.

Director Richard Lester isn’t making a movie as much as he’s lobbing a camera into a scene and letting it ricochet around. The black-and-white cinematography gives the movie a kitchen-sink illusion of realism. But the editing (and of course the all-original Beatles soundtrack) pulses with energy and invention. Dialogue darts around like it’s been passed between smart-alecks all day before arriving out of The Beatles’ mouths deadpan and impeccably timed. The jokes are miniature cherry bombs—quick, sharp, gone.

Each Beatle—John, Paul, George and Ringo—while hardly professional actors, find their own rhythm as they play versions of themselves. Lennon snipes like a man with too many one-liners to keep to himself. Harrison drops dismissals so dry they might as well be policy. McCartney moves through scenes with an easy composure, like someone for whom things naturally fall into place. And Starr somehow emerges as the emotional center—in particular as he wanders off into a brief solo adventure that is disarmingly wistful.

A Hard Day’s Night isn’t a film that chases meaning or momentum. It chases mood and movement. This is a pop-cultural sideswipe dressed up as a documentary. A farce as much as it is a vital snapshot in our pop culture history. The Beatles here are still boys—yet to be swallowed up by significance—fast, funny, and fresh. The camera catches them mid-air. And for 87 minutes, you’re just watching them fly.

Another tedious mile marker in Andy Sidaris’s babes-with-guns marathon of Hell. The good news, if you’re watching these in order (and why are you doing this to yourself?), is that you’re close to the finish line.

Movies built as nothing more than excuses for gratuitous nudity and unconvincing shootouts shouldn’t be this dull. And yet, here we are. The spy plot—or what passes for one—hinges on a jade statuette. Our pneumatic heroines (Dona Speir, Roberta Vasquez) have it. Some stock baddies want it. Their leader is a cartoon extraction of British menace. At one point, a henchman tases a heroine unconscious. She wakes on a plane, finds a live grenade and a parachute. Bail out, explosion. Onto the next scene.

Elsewhere, there’s a breathy-voiced woman who keeps showing up with a microphone. She’s apparently broadcasting coded spy chatter via some kind of radio show. She delivers one such transmission while topless in a hot tub—pirate radio hosted by a suicidal lunatic. Cynthia Brimhall saunters in as the team’s desk-bound operative. She also moonlights as a nightclub singer, as she does in all of Sidaris’s movies. And—as ever—she’s terrible. A bad performer and an even worse singer. Yet no one ever seems to notice.

The film’s closest brush with entertainment value comes late in the game: three consecutive soft-core scenes back-to-back. And it’s not the prurient value of the scenes that makes them entertaining—it’s the perfunctory cutaways jammed between them. They’re barely able to finish before they are interrupted by that same recycled soft-rock loop and another pair of sweaty characters start going at it. The third time this happened, I laughed out loud. It might be the only example in cinema history where the most entertaining thing about a sex scene isn’t the sex.

Otherwise, the jeeps look good, and so do the women—if you have a taste for silicon. But you can get that out of a magazine. And those come with better plotting.

Of all the Andy Sidaris films I’ve subjected myself to—and I’ve done this far more than any decent member of good society should (ever admit)—Hard Ticket to Hawaii is one of his more coherent entries. Which isn’t a compliment so much as it’s just something to note. For once, I could actually follow a narrative. This is a movie with a beginning, a middle, and even an ending. You might even notice there’s cause and effect. That is, if you’re paying attention to something other than the plumped-up boobies, of which there are many.

The protagonists (Donna Speir, Hope Marie Carlton) are equal parts Barbie and Rambo—two generously endowed heroines with feathered blonde hair and khaki hot pants. They carry around what might be Mary Poppins’ duffel bag. Any weapon you can think of, they’ll grab out of there and start firing it upon their enemies.

Their troubles begin when they happen to intercept a remote-controlled toy helicopter that’s carrying a shipment of black-market diamonds. That single event sets off a domino effect and a strange mixture of action-film staples: gunfire, rocket launchers, nunchucks, throwing stars, and bare midriffs. And somehow, all of this plays out casually.

The pleasures here are what you’d expect from Sidaris—women in peril who rarely seem perturbed, and men who flex more than they speak. There’s a kind of self-aware absurdity to this movie that occasionally breaks through like a ray of lunacy across a fog of deadpan nonsense. One scene involves an assassin who spends his days on the beach playing frisbee—until the baddies decide that he must be eliminated. The deed is done by swapping his normal frisbee with one lined with razor blades. And then there’s a cancer-infected snake that escapes its enclosure, terrorizes the island, and eventually explodes in a toilet. That’s one of the film’s clear highlights.

As low-budget exploitation goes, this one’s surprisingly watchable, if only because it’s occasionally aware of its own stupidity. The rest is wallpapered in wooden acting, canned dialogue, and shootouts that appear choreographed by someone who’s only ever seen guns on lunchboxes. Still, if you’re in the mood for trash—true, glistening, utterly brainless trash—I wouldn’t recommend this, per se, but it has its moments.

Clearly a lot of care went into these costumes and sets—with the pinstripe suits, the feathered gowns, and the Art Deco fixtures—that this is less a movie and more a dream version of 1930s Harlem. I only wish they remembered to put something interesting in the script. A film that dazzles the eye but tests the patience.

Richard Pryor plays Sugar Ray, a cool-headed gangster running a Harlem nightclub and illegal casino with his surrogate son and right-hand man Quick (Eddie Murphy). Quick dresses impeccably and kills efficiently, usually in that order. A crooked cop (Danny Aiello), fronting for crime boss Bugsy Calhoune (Michael Lerner), tries to muscle in for a cut. But Sugar Ray and Quick—uninterested in incorporating extortion into their business model—decide to fight back.

That’s the plot, give or take a few shootouts. The bigger problem is that Harlem Nights drags itself from scene to scene with roughly the enthusiasm of a tax seminar. The dialogue alternates between limp threats and low-effort barbs. There’s also a peculiar overreliance on the phrase “crazy bitch,” which not only starts to feel offensive but it gets so repetitive that it feels like placeholder text that someone forgot to fill in.

The cast is all-star, but instead of igniting, most of them look half-asleep in three-piece suits. At least there are some flickers of goodness. Redd Foxx, squinting through glasses that seem thick enough to read the future, steals his scenes just by being his usual cantankerous self. Too bad the film wasn’t better, but this was at least a decent role for his final screen appearance.

A valiant effort, perhaps, especially considering this is Eddie Murphy’s one and only directorial effort. But it feels more like a soft-focus vanity project with a great wardrobe and too little of consequence to say. Beautiful but shapeless. A fabulous cast that feels flat. The kind of film that makes you wish someone had taken all the talent aside and asked, “Can we start over?”