Wednesday, April 29, 2015

The Cobbler (2014)

Directed by Thomas McCarthy
Written by Thomas McCarthy and Paul Sado
Starring Adam Sandler, Method Man, Steve Buscemi and Dustin Hoffman

Max Simkin repairs shoes in the same New York shop that has been in his family for generations. Disenchanted with the grind of daily life, Max stumbles upon a magical heirloom that allows him to step into the lives of his customers and see the world in a new way. Sometimes walking in another man's shoes is the only way one can discover who they really are.


Throughout the run-time for this movie, the entire thing feels like it was conceptualized to be a short film, but some Hollywood big-wig got a hold of it, slapped Adam Sandler's name to it and told them to stretch it out to forty-five minutes longer than it should be. Or perhaps they just added too much to the plot.

Rather than changing the focus of the movie as many times as they did, they should have kept to the plot of the first two acts. A cobbler finds that one of his machines has these magical powers, then uses said machine for his own advantage, but soon finds himself in over his head. 

Had they stuck to that script instead of making him use his powers for good in a completely convoluted and unnecessary way, this could have been a better movie. But they decided to over complicate things to the point where it felt like the director didn't know what it was about.


Regardless of all the problems I had with this movie, I feel we remember Adam Sandler movies as being worse than they are. Now I'm not talking about "Jack and Jill" or another painfully bad movie. But on average his movies are -- well, average. 

I feel that there is so much hate thrown towards them because they aren't as good as "Billy Madison" or "Happy Gilmore". Would I watch "The Cobbler" again? No, unless it was on TV and every other channel was some TLC reality series. But I wouldn't go so far as to say this was a terrible movie. It's just average.

My Rating: 5.5/10


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