Commence the screaming. So this is about an adult man named Hubie Dubois (Adam Sandler). The town of Salem hates him, and rightfully so, as he tends to ruin almost any party with his strict rule-following and easiness to scare. He still lives for Halloween, and when events take a turn for the sinister one year, who is going to believe quick-to-frighten Hubie? If you’re surprised about this movie, I’ve got nothing for you. Sandler only turns in a good performance about once every full Chinese zodiac cycle, so even though Uncut Gems was brilliant, it is not surprising in the least that he went immediately back to his bread and butter. Even more so, Sandler even warned us that he would do this if he got snubbed for an Oscar, so can you even be mad at him?
The short answer is yes. Yes, you can be.
Now to be completely candid with you, whenever I see those two little words, “Happy Madison,” I brace myself for the worst. Sandler’s whole entourage is here except for David Spade and Chris Rock, and even more foreboding is the fact that Sandler is doing a voice. There are not any jokes to speak of here; it is just a lot of yelling, reactions, and romanticizing high school years, and you already know that Sandler has built his career around this. When they wrote this, they truly believed that if they repeated a gag enough times, it would somehow become funny. There’s this magical multi-purpose thermos in this, and they go back to it no less than a dozen times. It is just something random that they use to move the plot forward, and it never starts being funny. This entire town hates Hubie because he’s a narc, and that would be fine except the whole population here is actively interested in insulting him and pulling pranks on him, and it just comes off as this weird obsession.
He is so easy to scare that it comes off as making fun of the disabled.
There is nothing to recommend here, and yet I still feel like I got off easy. Hubie Halloween isn’t even close to being the worst Happy Madison production, and while I would never call this entertaining, I will take this over any of the Grown Ups movies any day of the week. Even though the jokes aren’t funny, they don’t linger like a bad smell, and this movie is consistently moving forward, however inane the plot points may be. I did get one genuine big laugh towards the beginning out of this from Dan Patrick because of the way he delivered his line, so if nothing else, I can say that I got something out of this. Everything else aside, this is just humor for the lowest common denominator, and you can find something better to watch.
Hubie Halloween (2020) *1/2
– Critic for Hire
Critic for Hire 