I Watched Grown Ups 2 Every Week For No Reason

September 25th, 2022

It is 4:36 in the morning, and I am sitting in the seating area of a closed airport McDonald’s unsure of whether to watch Grown Ups 2 again. It is a Tuesday. This is an assigned Grown Ups 2 day (any Monday or Tuesday is a viable option), on what could be my 9th viewing in 9 weeks. I have spent the entire summer watching this terrible movie, every week. Why? I’m not so sure, but as I sit in the most uncomfortable seat I can find, in order to evade sleep for long enough to write this piece, it seems I face a reckoning. I now know from experience that one bad Grown Ups 2 viewing can destroy oneself.  This raises the question: do I again, throw myself into the Sandler abyss for no good reason, with the promise of the damage it will bring, or do I walk away unscathed and leave the past 8 weeks behind me?

Grown Ups 2 is the 2013 sequel to the 2010 film Grown Ups, my least favourite film of all time. Grown Ups is a film with an evil soul. Grown Ups 2 is not so simple. It is the only sequel Adam Sandler has ever made. It has an 8% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a work from Sandler’s own production company, Happy Madison, and so the Sandman has sole creative control. With this freedom, he offers us Grown Ups 2. It is not a good film. It had a budget of 80 million US dollars. Shaquille O’Neal and Stone Cold Steve Austin are in it. The movie begins with a CGI deer pissing on Sandler and his family.

 The plot of Grown Ups 2 can only be described as an experiment with time.

 In 2014 two New Zealand comedians Guy Montgomery and Tim Batt watched this film every week for a year, and documented the results in a podcast. This makes my effort both, unoriginal, uninspired, and less dedicated in comparison. There is nothing for me to gain here – nobody brags about climbing a small amount of Everest. But to paraphrase English Mountaineer George Mallory, we watch Grown Ups 2 because it is there. And also to turn it into content. I never planned to write about Grown Ups 2 – I didn’t keep a watch diary, or even exactly track the number of viewings. A better article would’ve had me review the experience each week and compile the results into a chronological timeline of humorous insanity. Instead all I have is this.

Around a year ago I went through what for me, was a pretty bad breakup. I was very sad, and I didn’t shut up about it. Now I’m still a bit sad, but I talk about it less. Maybe that’s why I watched Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Kevin James, whilst said breakup partner interrailed through Europe, experiencing exciting new horizons sans Sandler. In my notes for this, written at 12:05AM, I describe Trojan Horsing my sadness into this piece. So here is the wooden bronco. Please don’t look inside, just let it through the gates. 

The plot of Grown Ups 2 can only be described as an experiment with time. The film takes place on the last day of school before summer vacation, and loosely follows Lenny Fader (played by Sandler) and his friends. The difference between the actors and their characters is so negligible I’ll use their names interchangeably. The writers also did this for the film’s less expensive players and just forgot to name characters. The film’s four leads each also have families. Does every single member of the family have a plotline in addition to the film’s four leads? Yes. A lot of things happen in the film. None of them matter, and less of them make sense. The film feels very very long. It condenses approximately 14 hours into an hour and a half, but it feels like 20.  

I also worked for the majority of this summer, taking as many bartending shifts as I could. Maybe this is also why I watched Lenny Fader, who has had a job since he was 16, having a free schedule and trying to enjoy the fun. (This is a line from the film. I know a lot of lines from the film.) After my breakup, I worked an insane amount of hours in a fast food burger restaurant for three months. There is something comforting about repeating something you hate, either because the familiarity erodes you to the point of submission, or it just creates enough white noise to cancel out the surrounding clamour. In an airport line the day after my last shift at the burger place, I had a breakdown. Maybe when the white noise leaves, the floodgates open. Maybe this is why I’m hesitant to stop watching Kevin James manifest a world in which his wife loves him like his mum does. Maybe it's because Grown Ups 2 is a low stakes world in which death doesn’t exist (a fun game to play when watching the movie is to yell every time someone should’ve died). The movie is still dreadful, and the shame of seeing those same opening titles only intensifies over time. 

But it’s not even that deep – I’m in a better place now, and I was before I started watching Fader, Higgins, and whatever Kevin James’ and Chris Rock’s characters are called. Maybe the true Trojan Horse of Sadness was inside the previous Trojan horse – I am in fact, trying to sneak an emotional core, via metaphorical wooden horse, into my own brain to justify writing about something so stupid. Maybe I wasn’t taking this seriously, much like Sandler & Co who I watched fucking around and phoning it in for millions of dollars. Maybe I was just phoning the summer in. I’ve never been great with summer, that smell just makes me think of GCSE exams. For the non-brits, those are the exams you take in secondary school. For the non-brits secondary school is the first 5 years of high school. For non-Americans, high school is that thing from 80s movies and a place where they do a lot of musicals. In summer, the people are too free, and there’s too great an expectation to have a good time. So many options, so choose none. Choose GU2.

In a way, Grown Ups 2 is a film about summer. The beginning of the season, the move from order to blissful chaos. As Brayden Higgins (David Spade’s long lost son) beautifully puts it ‘no school, summertime’. That’s why I decided to stop watching the movie at the end of summer, to keep the film in its sun-drenched bacchanalian context. And also why I’m at a crossroads, sitting on the spot between arbitrary seasons, the choice in my hands. Maybe it's time to let some things go. Or face the even more terrifying prospect – maybe Grown Ups 2 is actually pretty good. 

It isn’t though.

Stan has not learned from this experience, you can hear him discuss watching a new set of movies every week alongside Canadian funny man Tristan Bannerman in their Slim Radio show ‘Did you get that?’ every Tuesday at 16:30.