Jack and Jill (2011)

(On TV, January 2022) Much as some films are instant classics, others earn near-unanimous enmity and that’s where Jack and Jill comes in—immediately reviled upon release by the critical consensus, it has since become a bit of a punchline when someone wants to make a point about a bad movie. The trouble starts with the premise and certainly doesn’t stop there: With Adam Sandler playing both the protagonist and his twin sister, there’s a lot of potential there for showboating, crude jokes and an overarching “Isn’t it funny to see Sandler in drag???” atmosphere that will irritate even those who don’t dislike Sandler already. But Jack and Jill keeps going further and further into ill-conceived moments. To see an aggressively dumb film as this one manage to pull in none other than Al Pacino to play himself as the butt of jokes is almost confounding. I won’t try to pretend that Pacino’s career is solely made of unimpeachable material, or that it’s always terrible for stars to make fun of their image. But there’s something unusually repulsive in seeing Pacino beclown himself to such a degree, and even having the film itself acknowledge how terrible it is (“Burn it.”) doesn’t bring much solace. Jack and Jill is just irritating throughout—never as funny as it thinks it is, even dumber than it pretends to be and seldom amusing even as it goes through the motions of having a serious actor laughing at himself. It’s just a confounding film and not one that’s pleasant to watch. Critics had a point—while Jack and Jill is still watchable on a purely technical level as the product of a big-budget professional filmmaking enterprise (hence none of that stupid “worse movie of the year” nonsense, please), it’s still markedly worse than most comparable films. Heed the warning and give this one a miss… or do as I do, and wait a full decade and an easy “record this” button on your DVR to finally have an aghast look at the wreckage.