Cinema: The Next Worst Thing

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What a shame it was for the comics of the first decade of Saturday Night Live that there was ever such a thing as movies. First Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and John Belushi proved their worth as sketch artists who could inhabit weird, endearing characters while running wild laps around them. Then they exiled themselves into big-screen junk where they looked forlorn and their talents were cramped. Ninety minutes of Doctor Detroit offered a lot less pure Aykroyd than five minutes of his Nixon on S.N.L.

Adam Sandler is of the new S.N.L. breed. His Cajun Man, Opera Man and the rest were not varied characters; they were expressions of one capacious ego. The issue for him was not selling out but finding a buyer. And Hollywood, ever desperate for performers with male-teen appeal, bought. Sandler’s first two films, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore, were crude and slouchy, but they returned enough money on modest investments to turn Sandler into the next worst thing to a movie star. Now he raises the stakes, playing in director Ernest Dickerson’s industrial-strength action comedy Bulletproof with Damon Wayans, graduate of another TV sketch show, In Living Color, and a person of actual charm and talent.

Somebody–maybe screenwriters Joe Gayton and Lewis Colick–must have pitched this as The Defiant Ones only with lots of guns and cars and four-letter words. Keats (Wayans) is the undercover cop; Moses (Sandler), a member of a vicious drug gang, is the man in shackles. Together they’re on the run from Moses’ old gang lord (James Caan), who is so evil that his day job is selling used cars.

The cop and the criminal are natural enemies. Keats believes Moses put a bullet in his head; Moses thinks Keats betrayed him for the sake of a cheap bust. But as they drive around the desert, dodging machine-gun fire and stepping into plotholes of delirious implausibility, the two men get into tough-guy bonding at its wettest. Moses has no girlfriend, and Keats’ has an ulterior agenda. After a while the standard gross-out talk of action movies–the gay-baiting gags and threats of fellatio–makes for an odd subtext. All these swaggering men who say they hate each other are really in love.

Wayans, reprising the comic anger of his Major Payne, mostly gets to glower and spit out lines like “Shut the hell up!” Sandler has the whining sharpie role, playing up coquettishly to Wayans’ righteousness. He even–could this be more femme?–gets his own romantic shower scene, in which he warbles I Will Always Love You. But there’s not a lot of giving in his give-and-take scenes with Wayans. S.N.L. viewers know that when Sandler is singing in the shower, he’s singing to himself.