Yes Jack and Jill is exactly what it looks like: Adam Sandler, in that awkward phase of his career where he's ostensibly playing grown men, taking on the Eddie-Murphian task of playing multiple people. In this case, he's a schlubby, ostensibly rich ad exec named Jack and, under a mountain of makeup and saddled with a wacky accent, Jack's cartoonish, house-crashing sister Jill. It's exactly as cheesy as you'd expect, exactly as blatant as you'd believe, and maybe a smidge crueler than you might think. But come on, it is what it is. The plot (Jill foists her Bronx-bred obnoxiousness on Jack's white-collar, West-Coast holiday and refuses to leave) is tried and true. The jokes are so blatant they all but announce themselves with a cue card. Nobody could pay ten dollars to see this film and claim they didn't know what they were getting themselves into.
In case you're not catching my drift, though, let me simplify: yeah, it's bad. Not abysmally so, but still.
That being said, give credit where credit is due: Sandler tries hard to save this one. He's always been one to revel in the act of making an absolute fool of himself, and the grotesqueness of a movie like Jack and Jill is somewhat alleviated by Sandler's unfaltering commitment to his craft. While the wet-blanket Jack is so subdued you expect Katie Holmes, who plays his wife, to check his pulse every five minutes, there's a certain off-the-wall joviality to the way Sandler approaches the idea of playing a woman. He spares no amount of ridiculousness and earns some serious props in the process; not a lot of people could pull this off with the kind of gusto that he does. Yes, this all seems extraordinarily beneath him after Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People, but there is something to be said for a man who won't grow up.
It's unfortunate, then, that his portrayal of this particular woman is as nasty as it is. Sandler goes out of his way to turn Jill into...well, a kind of drag-queen character. She's a troll in pearls and heels who farts like a man, sweats like a mule and shrieks like a harpy and whose big funny moments come when she's decked by Jack's son or befouls her brother's house in a "chimichanga bomb" scene that has more fart noises in it than dialogue (oh, to have been a sound effects worker on this movie). The movie is actually so mean that when Jill, her heart of gold exposed, reconciles with Jack, it's both a relief that the abuse has ended and kind of unbelievable, since she's barely afforded a shred of dignity by him in much of the previous hour and a half.
Let's see, what else: there are some familiar, funny faces that pop up here and there. Tim Meadows from SNL, Shaquille O'Neal licking a ham, two very surprising cameos, and Nick Swardson -- Bucky Larson himself -- showing up in a thankless role as Jack's assistant. Oh, John McEnroe appears to raise hell again, a Sandler gimmick that's long past its due date yet somehow remains reliably funny.
But really, there is one reason and one reason only to see Jack and Jill, and that is Al Pacino's performance as a horror-show version of himself who spies Jill from afar and is suddenly roused to rediscover his artistic and (my goodness) sexual passion. Frankly, I'd have loved to hear how Sandler sold Pacino on this whole thing, but in any case, the payoff is pretty immense: Pacino's performance is wonderfully meta (lots of shouting here) and refreshingly self-deprecating, and it's both forgivable and hilariously ironic that his teeth-gnashing self-portrayal turns, by the end, into one of those foaming-at-the-mouth, late-game Pacino performances itself. The rap music video at the end might have been a bit much, all things considered, but like I said: these are the jokes, people.
