2. Jack and Jill
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 3%
Razzie Awards: 10
Box-Office Gross: $149,673,788
Released in February and already my worst film of the year Jack and Jill shan’t be going down as Al Pacino’s finest moment by any stretch of the imagination. He may have starred in William Friedkin’s controversial Cruising as a cop going undercover in New York’s gay S&M underworld but never before had we seen Pacino fisting his career to death on screen. You may think that some overly strong language to be using in a nice old article like this but you weren’t there man, you weren’t there (and by horrific implication it seems that I very much was).
Wait a second, what a silly assumption to make. When I said you weren’t there I’m guessing that you probably were because from the box-office takings it seems that every silly man and his embarrassed dog went to see Jack and Jill and even then no one seemed to enjoy it. The reason I haven’t even mentioned Sandler yet is because it’s really no surprise to find him making a hell of a lot of money from a terrible film. I think by now it’s very clear that that’s the man’s career and if you were thinking “what about Punch Drunk Love?! Have you not been listening to your Kermode!” I’ll say this; “Paul Thomas Anderson is a hell of a director”.
Nevertheless Sandler is a commodity in himself and unto himself. He makes money. He laughs in the face of critical opinion and in this climate of conformity is that such a bad thing? Yes. Yes it is. Jack and Jill I suspect was such a success not in spite of it’s terrible reviews but because of them. Just like The Human Centipede (although in an entirely different way) Jack and Jill thrived on negative buzz because as everyone knows, negative buzz is buzz and when your distributor manages to get your latest rubbish into every Odeon from here to Timbuktu you’ll find an audience.
Even so, Jack and Jill was like watching a minor fender-bender in relation to something like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room which entered cinemas in similar fashion to an aeroplane smashing into a Rolls Royce motorway pile-up. If you’re going to do it wrong, do it right.
Oh, and it won every single Award at the 32nd Golden Raspberry Awards after achieving an unprecedented 12 nominations in the 10 categories available (Sandler doubled up in actor/actress fields). What a terrible film.
