I'm loath to call Armond or any critic "wrong" in any context, but, well, this certainly doesn't sound right:
It's inspiring to see Adam Sandler bounce back from last year's Judd Apatow catastrophe Funny People with the cheerful and surprisingly heartfelt Grown Ups. Instead of inflating a self-congratulatory stand-up comic's convention, Grown Ups offers a reunion of 1970s junior high school basketball teammates (Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Chris Rock) and shows how they struggle to achieve maturity--even as adult males vacationing with wives and children. It's as if Sandler realized what was so false and ineffective about Funny People: the coddling sarcasm, ethnic self-pampering and egotism presented as an enviable part of L.A. comics' privileged lifestyles. [...]
Sandler's reckless comedy pokes fun at his clique's immaturity. He doesn't pretend to create character studies; rather, he satirizes their common silliness as they revisit adolescent pranks and attitudes. One ploy of Sandler and Fred Wolf's screenplay is to democratize humor--spread affectionate derision all around--by repeating jokes that grow into an appreciation of our full humanity. Note the wet T-shirt ogling that goes from a nubile chick to a middle-aged hausfrau, or the sustained swimsuit-wedgie routine ("That was a man's ass?"). These jokes prove that Sandler isn't class-climbing or youth-pandering like Apatow but affectionately examines the fundamental insecurities of middle-age. [...]
Director Dennis Dugan shows such actorly, egalitarian rapport that Grown Ups surpasses the recent French film The Father of My Children. Grown Ups has a natural, spontaneous sense of how friends of shared sensibility grow apart yet stay instinctively intact. The mocking personalities are never guileful; the insistence on friendship resembles Leigh's insight and Renoir's grace but crossed with stand-up comic candor. Sandler's wardrobe of collegiate T-shirts humorously reveals the missed opportunities Feder never confesses: Grown Ups is nicely subtle about mid-life regret and lifelong promise. Unassuming as it is, Grown Ups' best moments suggest a humanist work of art.
I repeat: "[T]he insistence on friendship resembles Leigh's insight and Renoir's grace." Good thing everybody else left plenty of room on the poster for a blurb, because that is the greatest ever. Don't change, Armond.
ยท Renoir Lite-Hearted [NY Press]