Review of Just Go with It (2011) by Shiira — 18 Feb 2011

In Hawaii, Danny Maccabee meets his own kind, a pig, no doubt, meant to accost him, but the charging wild boar instead attacks Eddie(Nick Swardson), Danny's cousin, while he and the rest of the hiking party gets away.

It would've served Danny right had the pig reached this lying sociopath, but the deserving target escapes, just like how he escapes the bigger picture that the film as a systematic whole circumvents. Adam Sandler plays a womanizer, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who wears a prop wedding ring in order to sleep with duped women, gullible enough to buy his sob stories about an abusive wife.

In Gene Saks' "Cactus Flower", the 1969 film adapted from the Abe Burrows' Broadway play, Walter Matthau plays the same sort of cad, a dentist who avoids commitment by employing the same ruse as Danny, until, like the fellow medical professional, he meets the right woman(played by Goldie Hawn), in which case, the fake life that he set out for himself, suddenly becomes an inconvenience.

Whereas "Just Go With It" takes great pains to account for Danny's boorish behavior, the Saks film(written by Billy Wilder stalwart L.A.L. Diamond) makes no apologies about Julian's duplicity, nor claims on the dentist being a particularly nice guy.

At the outset, Toni attempts suicide, because unlike its callow remake, "Cactus Flower" has the decency to acknowledge the ramifications that come with lying, the falsehoods which Julian perpetuates to simplify his love life.

In "Just Go With It", an extended prologue shows how Danny's bride-to-be had broken the big-nosed Jew's heart on their wedding day, so when he sets in motion to bamboozle Palmer into thinking that a divorce to Katherine(his assistant at the practice) is imminent, we're supposed to root for him, because as the film plainly states, he's an underdog getting even with the female race entire.

Adding insult to injury, Palmer, as she's written, is the stereotypical dumb blonde, a schoolteacher who never questions the preposterous scenarios that Danny and his co-conspirators throw at her; most galling of all, the explanations behind his fake daughter's **** accent, followed closely by the ludicrous occupation that Katherine's fake boyfriend invents, complete with a worse Swedish accent.

Since Palmer(played by Brooklyn Decker) is a ten, so blatantly more attractive than the loser she gets saddled with, the filmmaker takes the statuesque blonde down a peg, making her out to be more foolish with every lie that strings this woman's heart along, all in the name of farce, as if physical beauty itself warranted punishment.

"Just Go With It" treats her like an adulteress, a sex bomb who sleeps with married men on the beach, but far from being a femme fatale, the woman teaches for a living, and sure enough, her hard-rocking bod belies a maternal and nurturing carriage.

It's open season on the babe because there's the presumption that somebody who looks like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, can't possibly have any feelings like normal people. Similar to "Cactus Flower", the patriarchal bent glares brightest throughout the final act, in which Danny never faces any consequences for his elaborate deceptions, since Palmer, with her infinite hotness, just moves on to the next man after the plastic surgeon chooses his assistant.

In essence, the film lets Danny off the hook without having to offer Palmer a well-deserved apology. Had she truly loved him, "Just Go With It" would have a harder time covering up Danny's misogyny.

The film "Just Go With It" most reminds me of is Neal LaBute's "In the Company of Men".