The Week Of is a 2018 comedy about two fathers with opposing personalities come together to celebrate the wedding of their children.
Adam Sandler‘s rocky relationship with Netflix continues with Robert Smigel‘s debut directorial comedy The Week Of, another absurd parable on life that checks off many of the Sandler standards with a layer of earnestness. And given Sandler’s remarkable intermittent high quality dramatic work with films like The Meyerowitz Stories and Punch-Drunk Love, there’s a kind of contact high that makes you a little more forgiving of his comedies. Sometimes. Here, admittedly, it’s got a lot more heart than his recent hokey outings, but still falls short to really be of any matter.
Kenny Lustig (Sandler) is a go-lucky family man whose eldest daughter Sarah (Allison Strong) is soon to be married. The new son-in-law-to-be is Tyler (Roland Buck III), his father Kirby Cordice (Chris Rock), a wealthy and popular heart surgeon. Struggling to keep with tradition, Kenny insists on paying for the whole affair, which becomes an obvious burden, refusing to let Kirby give him some financial help. Lodging people in a cheap hotel that is on its last legs, things ramp up to the final week that becomes a cascading nightmare of problems for Kenny as he must deal with a crowd of guests, including his legless and aging Uncle Seymour (Jim Barone), all the while trying to impress the doctor, who himself is dealing with his ex-wife and issues of own.
The formula is classic, wedding planning and the pitfalls that befall them a sub-genre all its own, and Smigel seems to embrace most of it with gusto, opting for loud and chaotic moments to drive the story, keeping poor Kenny in the eye of the storm. This leaves him juggling far more than he can handle yet always acting like it’s nothing he can’t take care of. The film extends the father themes by having Kenny be the warm-hearted overly-in-touch dad in direct contrast to the cold and distant Kirby, who is no where close to his own family. While that’s creatively a good start, and the film does manage to squeak out a few good moments from it, Rock is given far less to do and once we get to know Kirby’s playbook, it leaves the character without much impact, and worse, a few awkward moments that earn no laughs.
Movies like this are bound by their structure, and as such, The Week Of sees three-quarters of the film built in mayhem, with lots of screaming and yelling, loads of contrived conflicts and a bevy of rapid-fire back and forths, all leading to the sentimental close. Sandler gets a chance to go soft for a bit and reveal that wonderful vulnerable side that makes his serious films so powerful, though alongside the flippant low hanging fruit comedy everywhere else, makes for a misfit. This will leave most viewers wondering where to stand, as the big-tent juggling act of jokes and gags sets a fast pace that never quite feels in step with the larger emotional message of father and daughter that should be the real takeaway. There’s a lot of potential here and Smigel could certainly hone what he’s got if he gets behind the camera again, but like almost all Sandler films, this is going to keep audiences divided.