Dir. Peter Segal, 2004 , USA , 99 mins
Cast: Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore, Rob Schneider, Dan Ackroyd, Sean Astin, Lusia Strus
"When your girlfriend has amnesia you have to win her over.every single day."
Adam Sandler is obviously a man who loves to have familiar faces around him. Either that or he works by the philosophy of "if it ain't broken, don't fix it!"
50 First Dates sees him team up with a cast and crew that he has worked with to great effect in the past. Their closeness and camaraderie definitely helps this romantic comedy maintain its feel-good factor.
Sandler plays Henry, a love-em-an-leave-em lothario, who works as an arctic marine life vet at a Hawaiian Sea Park. In order to keep to his ten-year plan of sailing to Alaska to study the underwater life of walruses, he fulfils his carnal needs through vacation romances with unsuspecting tourists. This is usually done with the help of his best friend, Ula (the very funny Rob Schneider).
Then, one day, he happens upon Lucy (Barrymore). After unexpectedly finding himself in a Hukilau Café, he spots her making tepees out of her waffle breakfast and is instantly smitten. They strike up a conversation, and after chatting and laughing a lot they arrange to meet for breakfast the following day.
The next day however, Lucy fails to recognise him. Henry learns that she has been involved in a car accident, and has an incurable neurological disorder where she has no short-term memory. Every time she goes to sleep, her memory of anything after the accident is erased. Her family and friends then recreate the same day each morning - a kind of Memento meets Groundhog Day scenario!
Henry realises that if he wants to win her affections, then he is going to have to woo her every day for the rest of his life, and hope that she remembers him.
What follows is a series of hilarious sketches where Henry tries to "reacquaint" himself with Lucy. And every day there are different results. The funniest of which sees Lucy beating Ula with a baseball bat.
Adam Sandler has great comic timing, and the strength of this movie is the obvious chemistry he has with the rest of the cast. It is surprising he has taken so long to team up with Barrymore again (after The Wedding Singer), whilst Schneider, Allen Covert and Dan Ackroyd are all regulars from his Saturday Night Live days.
Add in Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings) as Lucy's lisp talking-steroid taking brother Doug, Alexa - Henry's East-German, genetic-experiment assistant (Strus - "I prefer sausage to taco"), a walrus called Jocko, and the scene-stealing Willie the Penguin, and you are never short of laughs.
Peter Segal's (Anger Management) direction never allows the film to become too schmaltzy. He uses the magnificent location scenery to great affect, (the Hawaiian Tourist Board's job will be a lot easier this year). With a feelgood, Caribbean "holiday" soundtrack that includes unusual reggae covers of songs by The Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen (as well as some original Bob Marley), you can't help but have a smile on your face when you leave the cinema.
Sandler fans can look out for the usual sprinkling of slapstick fun, including a hilarious vomit gag; some great one-liners like "sneaky between cheeky". And they even pay homage to Monty Python and Happy Gilmore in another laugh-out-loud scene with Ula and Henry.
Mark Arnold
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