It is amazing how such an incredible line-up could produce such an incredibly bad film. With a cast including Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and Rob Schneider, ‘Grown ups’ would seem a certain treat for any movie buff. Unfortunately a great cast is wasted on a film without direction that consists almost entirely of dull one-liners.

BY CONNOR DALY

Grown ups follows the reunion of five friends after thirty years apart, each with very different lives which are revealed more and more throughout the film. A school championship winning basketball team back in 1978, the five friends come together after the death of their former coach and spend the 4th July holiday at the same lake house at which they celebrated their championship victory three decades earlier.

Glimpses of each character’s lives and jokes among the old team mates dominate the opening scenes of the film, and repeated coincidental meetings with their 30-year basketball rivals mean a final showdown is just waiting to happen.

Gags and one-liners haunt this film, and it is after the coach’s funeral and the families’ arrival at the lake house that the plot truly takes a turn for the worse. Here follows a sequence of random events, with the grown-ups playing games they enjoyed as children and encouraging their own kids to enjoy the simpler things in life.

Long gone are Adam Sandler’s golden days in Billy Madison and The Waterboy, and Chris Rock’s classic moments in Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob strike back, instead, Grown ups is as predictable as an appearance from Steve Buscemi in a Sandler movie.

Moments of humour are few and far between, the film’s plot is almost entirely incoherent, and Grown ups proves once and for all that star value does not necessarily guarantee the quality of the finished product.