I love a good actor renaissance. Watching someone who was historically consigned to the limitations of one genre, pivot and instead show us that, below the glossy veneer, is a genuine actor. Matthew McConaughey’s felt like it made sense. Brendan Fraser’s felt heartwarming. Adam Sandler‘s felt wholly surprising.
When I first watched Uncut Gems, I left the theatre with more questions than answers. Why did I feel so dizzy? What’s the strongest sedative I can buy? And was that really Adam Sandler I just watched?
As I watched the mirrored shot of Sandler’s character, lying on the floor with a gunshot wound in his head, I waited with bated breath for either David Spade or Kevin James to bust into shot and pull the rug from under the whole thing. To say that this film was one elaborate ruse, a satire of high-brow cinema that would swiftly be undercut by an ending that involved those three members of the Sandler alumni.
But that never happened, and the film concluded. I left the cinema like many others that year, both baffled and encouraged by this return to drama for Sandler. This was a renaissance that eclipsed McConaughey’s from just under a decade earlier, simply for how awful the run of films that Sandler released before Uncut Gems.
That’s My Boy, Grown Ups, Blended and Jack and Jill all came out in the chapter before Uncut Gems, with the latter film representing the true bottom of the barrel. To us, it hinted towards a state of career complacency from Sandler. That the days of his own scrappy ideas being developed on a shoestring budget were long gone, and instead replaced by half-baked comedic crap, served on a silver platter of big studio distribution.
Sandler was fully aware of that, however. He knew that the movies he was creating in that spell of mediocrity were there to serve one purpose and one purpose only: finance. Because when asked about his 2005 remake of The Longest Yard, Sandler answered transparently about what he considered to be its redeeming qualities.
“It was going. It was going. They were doing it,” he explained, when outlining the relentless production of the project. “And it was cool, and I was like, if they’re doing it, I might as well be in it. Compared to the first one, not even close. It ended up doing alright. Paid for some things in our house. It made no sense.”
It was a remake of the 1974 film starring Burt Reynolds, and so the fact that Reynolds himself agreed to star in the remake may have felt like a good sign to Sandler. But it soon became clear that the reboot steered away from the gritty commentary of America’s prison system and instead leaned into the baselessness of an underdog story.
Reynolds chose not to watch the film upon release, and Sandler chose to buy some furniture for his house and move on. If anything, it provided the very lowest ebb of the arc that would later end in Sandler’s 2020 renaissance.
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