The Waterboy (1998)

Directed by Frank Coraci. Starring Adam Sandler, Henry Winkler, Kathy Bates, Fairuza Balk, Jerry Reed, Peter Dante, Larry Gilliard Jr., Jonathan Loughran, Blake Clark, Robert Kokol. [PG-13]

Adam Sandler affects a lisp and a stutter for another one of his infantile misfit characters, here a 30-ish Louisiana boy named Bobby Boucher with a severe case of arrested development living in a swamp shack with his overbearing mama (Bates) and working as a water boy for the local college football team. Mama hates the “foosball”, but it turns out Bobby is quite good at it, especially the part where he’s able to tap into his bottled rage and unleash it as explosive violence against the opponent. The “Sandman” faithful showed up in droves to see this one when it came out (to date, it’s still the highest-grossing sports comedy of all time), but the deconstructionist man-child appeal was wearing pretty thin by this point, as he’s unable to carry the cheap, lazy gag-writing found here that would (sadly) become a familiar component in most of his lowbrow comedies from here out. It’s unfortunate the grating hero is so hard to take at length because Bates and Henry Winkler (the team’s welcoming but timid head coach) have some humorous moments…although each must inevitably debase themselves for the sake of a few bad boffolas. Be on the lookout for a three or four belly-laughs, but it’s rough-going sometimes getting to them—Rob Schneider makes a cameo appearance, after all. Most of the other cameos come of the field of sports and sports broadcasting, among them Lawrence Taylor, Dan Patrick, Brent Mussburger, Lynn Swann, and Dan Fouts.

37/100