Review: Going Overboard

Adam Sandler plays a cruise ship waiter (!) and wannabe stand-up comedian who has the annoyingly contrived name of Shecky Moskowitz. Scott Larose plays ship comedian Dickie Diamond. True to his name, he’s a foul-mouthed, arrogant douchebag who has no time for Shecky’s hero worship. When Dickhead…er…Dickie gets locked in the bathroom (!) with a bout of food poisoning, Shecky might just get his big shot, even if angry hecklers like Billy Bob Thornton (!) prove a tough audience. Liza (Lisa) Collins Zane plays Miss Australia, one of several Miss World pageant contestants on board the ship. She gets on the wrong side of dictator General Noriega (Burt Young. Yes, that Burt Young) who sends a couple of goons to assassinate her for insulting him. Billy Zane (in his second film on a boat from 1989) turns up as the god Neptune (!), Peter Berg plays a dork on board the ship, Adam Rifkin is an awful punk rocker on board, and Tom Hodges (Chip from “Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise”) plays Shecky’s buddy, who falls for Miss Australia. Milton Berle turns up as himself to help Shecky on his gags.

 

There’s no doubt that Adam Sandler’s first starring role is a truly appalling film. This is a really badly made, excruciatingly unfunny film. However, I find it hard to label this his worst film because a) My expectations for it were low to begin with having heard its reputation, and b) This is Sandler pre-“SNL”, let alone pre-“The Wedding Singer”, and so I’m not even sure this deserves to be thought of as an Adam Sandler vehicle. So although I’m going to give this film a lower score than any other Adam Sandler film to date, let me be clear that although this is the worst film he has ever appeared in (Yes, even worse than “Mixed Nuts”, which takes some beating), I consider “Jack and Jill”, “Just Go With It”, “That’s My Boy”, and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” to be the worst ‘Adam Sandler’ vehicles. This isn’t an Adam Sandler vehicle, it’s merely a film that he’s the lead actor in (though several of his cronies do appear in it as well like “Little Nicky” director Steve Brill and a shockingly young Allen Covert, who also served as Production Assistant) and occasionally presents a dry-run of his now familiar schtick in, but mostly plays a bland straight man with occasional “Ferris Bueller” asides to camera that aren’t remotely amusing.

 

Made in 1989, this film from debut writer-director Valerie Breiman (who has only directed three other minor films) is so bad that even Sandler himself (who only had a recurring role on “The Cosby Show” to his name) appears to be embarrassed by it. He doesn’t even list it in his filmography on his official website. Rather than a typical Adam Sandler vehicle it reminds one more of the bargain-basement, Israeli-made sex comedies from Golan-Globus or the T&A comedy of “Vice Academy” (Director Breiman later went on to direct a film called “Bikini Squad”, so there you go), or hell, even a lame Troma comedy (The presence of “Chopper Chicks in Zombietown” alum Billy Bob Thornton reinforces this), albeit without any of the sex or nudity that those examples would likely have provided.

 

Don’t let the names Billy Bob Thornton, Billy Zane, Burt Young (Who has never said ‘no’ apparently), and Peter (Pete) Berg in the cast fool you, Zane was the only person in the film who had appeared in anything worthwhile up to this point, and of the three, only Billy Bob shows evidence of the talent he would later prove to be. He’s not great, don’t get me wrong, but cast in a cameo role as a pissed off cruise patron, he walks off with whatever this film is worth. Zane, Young, and Berg are handed lemons, I’m afraid, there’s nothing funny about their characters or performances. In fact, Young’s role (used as a framing device, a really poor one) made practically no goddamn sense whatsoever in the film and Zane’s appearance (and performance) as the god Neptune is like something out of a bad “SNL” sketch. A really bad one. During the Randy Quaid/Robert Downey Jr./Anthony Michael Hall season where everyone was probably coked out of their skulls. I’ve never found Zane funny, though, so perhaps comedy just isn’t his thing. The whole thing is cheap and amateurish, and seriously boring. Special mention must go to two cast members, Scott Larose, and Aussie actress Lisa (Collins) Zane. The former plays the on-board comedian, but he is so thoroughly unpleasant, monotonously profane, and nauseatingly unfunny that you almost want to throw rotten fruit at the screen. As for the now former Mrs. Billy Zane, she’s not only a horrendous actress (one of the worst I’ve ever witnessed), but her apparently very real Aussie accent sounded so incredibly broad that I assumed she was a phony. Nope, she’s an Aussie and someone clearly told her to talk like Outback Jack, thinking that’s how a real Aussie talks (Not even close, and she should’ve told them to bugger off). Fine, but then why did she fuck up the Australian national anthem at one point? I think she’s singing the older version of it, but this film was made in 1989, I was 9 years old at the time, and we did not sing the older version of the anthem at school even as far back as 1986, let alone ‘89. Unless some parts of the country were slower on the uptake than New South Wales, then someone done fucked that up, and I think the actress herself, being Australian, must take the blame there. Meanwhile, Uncle Milty shows he’ll turn up in anything handed to him, but I have to say that his jokes, although not especially memorable, weren’t so bad that they needed the laugh track to compensate. That was a tad desperate I think. But I’m not adding anything to the rating for a couple of OK Milton Berle zingers, for cryin’ out loud, especially when they barely connect with anything else in the film.

 

Cast as a cocktail waiter on a cruise ship who wants to be a comedian, this plays like Adam Sandler has been transplanted onto a cheapo 80s sex comedy with all the sex gone, and Sandler’s voice pitched a tad higher (He was only 23 at the time). The results are sleep-inducing when not irritating. Moving on…

 

Rating: D-