CLICKETY CLACK

REVIEWED -  CLICKAdam Sandler is given a magic remote in a mild comedy that never quite, er, clicks, writes Donald Clarke

WHEN was it decided that the default comedy plot of the decade would concern a father who, after undergoing some supernatural metamorphosis, realises that his devotion to work is making him a stranger to his own family? It's not as if the originators of these glib morality tales are likely to have firsthand experience of such traumas. Screenwriters spend their days sloping around the house in slippers and dressing gown, seeking any diversion to delay a return to the keyboard. The average writer will jump at the chance to indulge in displacement activities such as sports days or visits to the petting zoo.

Anyway, this latest attempt to stoke guilt in the middle-aged bosom finds Sandler, as unlikely an architect as was Keanu Reeves in The Lake House, increasingly harried at work and nagged at home. His boss, played with a welcome twinkle by David Hasselhoff, has promised him a partnership if he can placate the firm's new Japanese clients. Meanwhile, Adam's wife and parents are starting to tire of seeing only brief glances of the increasingly cataleptic man of the house.

One evening, frustrated by repeatedly turning on the overhead fan when he actually wants to watch television, Sandler sets out to buy a universal remote control. After briefly dozing off in the household goods store (you're way ahead of the action here, I suspect), he encounters mad Christopher Walken, who hands him a device designed, one might speculate, with the express purpose of demonstrating the dangers of getting what you wish for. Walken's remote allows Sandler to fast forward through the boring bits of life, turn down the sound on the noisier ones and, by accessing a commentary from James Earl Jones, gain insight into the more puzzling ones.

Click is, for good or ill, one of Sandler's classier entertainments. Kate Beckinsale, rather than some recently laid-off Hooters waitress, plays the protagonist's sorrowful wife. The score is surging. The action, epic in time-span if not in ambition, takes us all the way from the hero's conception to his unhappy death. Along the way the film-makers do find some amusing things to do with the enchanted remote, and the closing sequences, though shamefully manipulative, should cause even the most resistant heart strings to register a tug.

But the film is outrageously dishonest. The eventual message (you won't be surprised to hear) is that, by depriving the owner of the miseries that put happiness into relief, such a magical device would make life unbearable. Strange that the posters and the trailers still sell the film as an exercise in wish fulfilment.