The 9 Most Scathing Critical Responses to Just Go With It

Adam Sandler, that patron saint of scathing critical responses, returns to the multiplex this weekend with bad review magnet Jennifer Aniston in Just Go With It, a romantic comedy about a plastic surgeon who lies about being married to sleep with younger women. As if the trailers or that premise didn't warn you enough to stay away -- shockingly, the film is based on the 1969 film Cactus Flower, co-starring Walter Matthau and Goldie Hawn, which itself was based on a French play -- the nation's best and brightest critical minds have come up with a variety of flowery ways to tell you to how much it sucks eggs. Click ahead for the nine best takedowns.

9. "I don't know what the process was to make this movie or how much time was actually spent coming up with it, but Just Go With It feels like Sandler and [director Dennis] Dugan doing something which they know will be an easy paycheck. The little girl actress they cast to play Aniston's daughter in the film is 'Bailee Madison', does anyone really believe they hired her because she might be good for their movie and not because her name sounds like the title of Sandler's first film? There's no way they took any of this seriously." -- Josh Tyler, CinemaBlend

8. "Wading through this puerile mess is exhausting for the viewer, but it seems to have tuckered Sandler out even before he punched his time card for yet another factory gig. It's painfully clear he knows this is weak stuff, yet he can't seem to rouse himself to do anything about it. He sabotages the potentially good chemistry with Aniston by relentlessly mugging at every turn. Is Sandler now choosing films strictly on the basis of how pleasant the weather and locales are?" -- Peter Howell, The Toronto Star

7. "Just Go With It is a Sandler-Dugan movie all the way, which means it includes a hula-dancing throwdown between Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman in a Honolulu lounge (officiated by sportscaster Dan Patrick), Dave Matthews picking up a coconut with his ass cheeks, and a small boy taking a crap on an adult man, who then screams about it in a fake German accent. I will not claim that none of those things made me laugh. But I cried too, partly at the realization that Sandler's particular brand of evil genius lies in taking a painfully stupid joke and pushing it so far that it sometimes transforms into its opposite, like some quantum-physics particle or that Hall & Oates song you hated the first 800 times and now totally love." -- Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

6. "At a tacky house party he meets Palmer (Brooklyn Decker), a slow-motion blonde who works with -- what else -- children. One walk on the beach later Danny's whole life has changed: He's connecting with a woman for the first time. Decker's nipples make a more convincing argument for the attraction; whenever she opens her mouth the spell of her physical charisma is broken. As though her own nipples were alerted to a potential upstaging, about 20 minutes in Aniston gets a Rodeo Drive makeover after she agrees to help Danny convince Palmer that the wedding ring she finds is the last remnant of their failed marriage. The body comes out, as it will whenever doubt about Aniston's enduring hotness edges in. This is by far the crappiest thing about this deeply crappy film: Over and over, the women disrobe while the men sit back and evaluate, compare, and contrast. This is primal, social order stuff; an attentive gopher would get the gist." -- Michelle Orange, Movieline

5. "You know you're in trouble when you're suffering a comedy shutout and the pinch-hitters you send in are Nicole Kidman and Dave Matthews (as her dim hubby). In a scene of crass exploitation, Kidman and Aniston do an endless hula dance-off in bikini top and grass skirts that culminates with the former holding a coconut between her chin and Matthews' crotch -- and then against his butt. We later learn that gay guys are really good at picking up coconuts with their butt cheeks, but only after we're treated to a scene featuring a flamboyant, lisping hairdresser whose hands flap on their wrists. I'm not saying gay men should be offended by Just Go With It. I'm saying everyone should be offended by the time-annihilating suckage of this mirth void. It's as bad as showing up at the Super Bowl only to be told your tickets are no good. It's as bad as being ordered to work all weekend to cover for your boss while he's golfing in St. Bart's. It's as bad Little Fockers." -- Kyle Smith, New York Post

4. "The people in this movie are dumber than a box of Tinkertoys. One fears they're so unfortunate it's not Politically Correct to laugh at them. That's not a problem because Just Go With It is so rarely funny. Here is a story that began as a French farce. Then it was adapted into a Broadway play named Cactus Flower. Then the play was made into a movie. Now it has been made into another movie. This process has diluted it like a homeopathic medicine, so that not an atom of the original formula can be found." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

3. "Just Go With It [is] a comedy so noxious it seems the product of deliberate malignity. Surely the sour, vapid, miserable world of this movie can't reflect any real human being's notion of what love or humor or good storytelling is -- not even a Hollywood screenwriter's. The only acceptable explanation for the existence of Just Go With It is that everyone involved in the creation of this movie -- the director Dennis Dugan, the co-writers Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling, the entire misused and humiliated cast -- hates romantic comedy and wants it to die." -- Dana Stevens, Slate

2. "I don't care how sharp your cast is, you need to have something on the page that works to begin with, and that gives them a foundation to start from when they're improvising. [Writer] Allan Loeb should probably fire his agents at this point, since he's gone from being a white-hot writer with two films on the Black List three or four years ago to being the credited screenwriter on The Dilemma and Just Go With It in 2011. Ouch. The original film was written by I.A.L. Diamond, Billy Wilder's writing partner, and I'm guessing he is spinning in his grave right now so hard that he might drill his way back to the surface. [...] The film is garish and ugly on a technical level, shot like the cinematographer was actively angry at everyone on the set, and Dennis Dugan continues to mystify me as a feature filmmaker. Did he save Sandler's life or something? Did he give him a kidney at some point? Why does anyone hire him? His movies have all the style and sophistication of an Army STD educational film, yet year in and year out, he's got some new crime he happily commits against the ticket-buyers." -- Drew McWeeny, HitFix

1. "Lewis Wolpert defined depression as 'malignant sadness'. George Santayana called it 'rage spread thin'. I call it 'watching an Adam Sandler romcom where he discovers he's been in love with his feisty pal Jennifer Aniston all along'. Just Go With It is so dispiritingly awful that responsible cinema staff should make audiences remove their ties and shoelaces on their way into the auditorium." -- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian