Grown Ups (film)



Grown Ups is a 2010 American comedy film directed by Dennis Dugan. It stars Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider as five lifelong friends who reunite for a July Fourth weekend with their families after learning about the sudden death of their middle school basketball coach.

Grown Ups was produced by Sandler's production company Happy Madison Productions and was distributed by Columbia Pictures. Sandler, Rock, Schneider, and Spade all joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in the 1990–1991 season; supporting cast including Colin Quinn, Maya Rudolph, Tim Meadows, and Norm Macdonald have also been SNL cast members. Despite receiving generally unfavorable reviews from critics, it grossed $271 million and led to a sequel, Grown Ups 2 (2013).

Plot
In 1978, five childhood friends Lenny Feder, Eric Lamonsoff, Kurt McKenzie, Marcus Higgins and Rob Hilliard win their junior high school basketball championship. Afterwards, they celebrate at a rented lake house. The friends' coach, Robert Ferdinando, whom they nickname "Buzzer", encourages them to live their lives in a similar way to how they played the game. Thirty years later, Lenny has become an ambitious Hollywood talent agent with his wife, fashion designer Roxanne, and his three children—daughter Becky and two sons Greg and Keith. The boys act like divas in his mansion, much to his chagrin. Eric claims that he is now a co-owner of a lawn furniture company, and is also disappointed in his wife Sally for continuing to breastfeed Bean, one of his two children, the other being Donna. Kurt is a stay-at-home father with two children, Andre and Charlotte. His wife Deanne, the primary breadwinner of the family, is pregnant with another child and shares the house with her mother Ronzoni. Rob, nicknamed Carrot, has been divorced three times, and holds custody of his daughters Jasmine, Amber, and Bridget. His current wife, Gloria, is thirty years his senior. Marcus is a slacker and lothario. All five friends regularly harass each other in comedic fashion: Lenny for being wealthy, Eric for being overweight, Kurt for being henpecked, Rob for his continuous use of the joke "Maize!" and for having a much older wife, and Marcus for being sexually juvenile.

The friends each find out that Buzzer has died, and reunite at their hometown with their families, a first in the three decades. Intending to pay tribute to Buzzer at a private funeral, Lenny rents the lake house for the Fourth of July weekend for his friends to stay at. However, Roxanne has planned a fashion show in Milan, forcing Lenny to leave early. While at the lake house, he becomes disheartened at how his sons are playing video games instead of being outdoors, and pushes them to play outside along with his friend's children, even having Eric demonstrate a rope swing next to the lake, only for Eric to chicken out due to the swing being too high above the water and accidentally hit a nearby tree and a bird in the process. At a local restaurant that night, Lenny talks to his old nemesis, Dickie, who is still angry towards Lenny for an error in the match, where his shot shouldn't have counted since he allegedly had his foot on the outside line. With this, Dickie challenges Lenny and his friends to a rematch, but he declines when commenting on Dickie's health. The next day, Buzzer's ashes are spread in the woods while Rob has a confidence crisis, regretting his failed marriages, and later warns the arrival of his three daughters from the previous marriages. After having to deal with Jasmine, he then relaxes with his friends partaking in fishing. After roasting Rob, the others elect to cheer him up with a game of arrow roulette. Rob wins by staying in the circle for the longest time, but the arrow impales his foot when it flies back down. Rob then snaps at Gloria for using a maize-covered poultice. As all of this is happening, Rob's other daughters Amber and Bridget arrive (with Jasmine and Amber being extremely attractive and Bridget looking almost identical to Rob). That night, Lenny manages to get the kids interested in talking on cup-phones and Roxanne accidentally reveals herself to be the "Tooth Fairy" when Becky listens in. Now happy that they are enjoying a similar kind of young fun that he had, Lenny proceeds to install an extensive cup-phone network in the house.

Roxanne settles on staying at the lake house over going to the fashion show. The friends decide to visit a water park, where Eric teaches Bean to drink regular milk directly out of a carton and Marcus repeatedly flirts with Jasmine and Amber, having bought them skimpy bikinis. The families cause chaos throughout the park; Rob pushes a ride attendant down a water slide when he insults Bridget for being less attractive than her sisters; Eric ignores Donna's warning about a chemical in the children's pool that turns urine blue; the spouses spot and attempt to attract a bodybuilder, but he is laughed off due to his high-pitched Canadian accent; and at the zip line attraction, Lenny and the group meet Dickie again, accompanied by his own group of friends and former teammates, including Wiley, who is severely injured after crashing into a shed while sliding down the zip line by his feet, resulting in him being stuck in a full-body cast for the foreseeable future.

Lenny teaches his son how to shoot a perfect shot during basketball, and the friends then end the night by sharing a dance with their spouses. The next day, Roxanne picks up Lenny's phone and confronts him on lying about canceling their flight trip before she agreed on staying, which he admits to doing only to get their kids to be normal for once. Eventually, everyone concedes into admitting their own truths about how they feel with their lives: Deanne believes Kurt plans to dump her for the Feder's live in nanny, but Kurt retorts that the only reason he hung out with her was because of Deanne's negligence; Eric reveals he got laid off from his job before the trip and only acted like a big man to so he wouldn't be the loser; Marcus had been feeling insecure about himself ever since reuniting with everyone; however Rob only admits that he's wearing a toupee, which everyone already knew. On their final day at the lake house, Lenny accepts the rematch once and for all, and plays against their former opponents. At the game-deciding shot, Lenny purposely misses to allow Dickie's team to get a proper win so they can finally know what winning feels like and he felt that his own family needed to know what losing feels like. Before the end of the film, a drunken Marcus plays another game of arrow roulette, but with a larger crowd of people this time. Everyone fearfully takes off, but a still-paralyzed Wiley is unable to run away and gets his foot impaled by the arrow. He then screams in pain and shouts out, "We win again!" before fainting.

Main cast

 * Adam Sandler as Leonard "Lenny" Feder
 * Michael Cavaleri as Young Lenny
 * Kevin James as Eric Lamonsoff
 * Andrew Bayard as Young Eric
 * Chris Rock as Kurt McKenzie
 * Jameel McGill as Young Kurt
 * David Spade as Marcus "Higgy" Higgins
 * Kyle Brooks as Young Marcus
 * Rob Schneider as Rob "Carrot" Hilliard
 * Joshua Matz as Young Rob

The Feder family

 * Salma Hayek as Roxanne Feder
 * Jake Goldberg as Greg Feder
 * Cameron Boyce as Keith Feder
 * Alexys Nycole Sanchez as Becky Feder

The Lamonsoff family

 * Maria Bello as Sally Lamonsoff
 * Ada-Nicole Sanger as Donna Lamonsoff
 * Frank and Morgan Gingerich as Bean Lamonsoff

The McKenzie family

 * Maya Rudolph as Deanne McKenzie
 * Nadji Jeter as Andre McKenzie
 * China Anne McClain as Charlotte McKenzie

The Hilliard family

 * Joyce Van Patten as Gloria Noonan-Hilliard
 * Madison Riley as Jasmine Hilliard
 * Jamie Chung as Amber Hilliard
 * Ashley Loren as Bridget Hilliard

Other characters

 * Blake Clark as Coach Robert "Buzzer" Ferdinando
 * Victoria Cyr, Niece of Coach Buzzer
 * Di Quon as Rita
 * Steve Buscemi as Wiley
 * Colin Quinn as Dickie Bailey
 * Hunter Silva as Young Dickie
 * Lisa M. (Seitz) Francis as Bailey's wife
 * Tim Meadows as Malcolm Fluzoo
 * Ebony Jo-Ann as Mama Ronzoni
 * Dan Patrick as Norby the Ride Guy
 * Tim Herlihy as Pastor
 * Norm Macdonald as Geezer
 * Jonathan Loughran as Robideaux
 * Connor Panzner as Young Robideaux
 * Dennis Dugan as Basketball Referee
 * Alec Musser as waterpark stud

Production
Filming commenced in Essex County, Massachusetts, in August 2009.

Box office
Grown Ups grossed $162 million in the United States and $109.4 million in other territories for a worldwide gross of $271.4 million against a production budget of $80 million. Grown Ups surpassed Click to become Sandler's highest-grossing film worldwide. Happy with the gross, Adam Sandler showed his appreciation by buying brand-new Maserati sports cars for his four co-stars.

Critical response
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 10% based on 165 reviews and an average rating of 3.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Grown Ups' cast of comedy vets is amiable, but they're let down by flat direction and the scattershot, lowbrow humor of a stunted script." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 30 out of 100 based on reviews from 32 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Connie Ogle of the Miami Herald referred to it as "the perfect poster child for this maddening summer of movie mediocrity." Rick Groen of The Globe and Mail criticized what he saw as blatant commercialism, saying the cast "lob[bed] gags they surely disdain at an audience they probably despise while reserving their own laughter for that off-camera dash all the way to the bank." Richard Roeper went as far as to say that it was "a blight upon the bright canvas of American cinema", and that he hated it. Tom Long of the Detroit News called it "trite comedy" and "total garbage." On the other end of the spectrum, Lisa Kennedy of the Denver Post called it "crude and decent-hearted" and "easy, breezy, predictable."

Awards
Rob Schneider was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor for the film, but lost to Jackson Rathbone for both The Last Airbender and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

The film won at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards for the "Best Line from a Movie" category, which it won for the line "I want to get chocolate wasted!", delivered by Becky, played by Alexys Nycole Sanchez.

Home media
Grown Ups was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on November 9, 2010.

Sequel
A sequel, titled Grown Ups 2, was released on July 12, 2013. Dennis Dugan, the director of the first film, returned as director. The main cast, including Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Salma Hayek, Maya Rudolph, Maria Bello and Steve Buscemi reprised their roles, except Rob Schneider. New cast includes Andy Samberg, Taylor Lautner and Patrick Schwarzenegger. The sequel follows Lenny Feder as he relocates his family back to the small town where he and his friends grew up. Like its predecessor, Grown Ups 2 received very poor reviews but was still a box office hit.