BILLY MADISON RATING: 7 / 10 --> Good movie
For more movie reviews and trivia, visit http://www.joblo.com/
PLOT: Billy Madison is the spoiled, rich, immature, slacker son of a multi-millionaire who is about to retire. To prove that he is worthy of taking over his father's company, Billy must go back to school and pass all of his classes from 1st to 12th grade. If he doesn't make it, one of his father's evil henchmen will take over the corporate reins.
CRITIQUE: Adam Sandler's first starring role is pretty standard Sandler fare with a touch of weirdness sprinkled throughout. This film is definitely not for kids, geared more towards adults who love all of Sandler's stupid schticks, his man-child character, rude behavior and over-the-top acting. I personally like Sandler's tricks, despite the fact that not all of them work in this movie. The plot in itself is a farce, and should not be taken seriously by anyone, unless they are looking to hate this movie. It's a stupid comedy movie that has been created to make you laugh at the exaggerated behavior by Adam and his goofy buddies (Chris Farley and Steve Buscemi come through in their nutty cameos). Unlike his other flicks, this movie takes some very strange turns in its second half, with Sandler breaking into a musical number, a person in a Penguin suit floating around, a wrestling character saving the day and plenty of material to demonstrate the possibility of soft drugs or heavy liquor being related to the writing of this screenplay :) Throwaway plot but enough funny "Sandler moments" to satisfy anyone looking for some strange, cheap laughs.
Little Known Facts about this film and its stars: Sandler's love interest in this film, actress Bridgette Wilson, was Miss Teen USA in 1990. Adam Sandler brought some of his buddies from TV's "Saturday Night Live" along for this one with Chris Farley playing the crazy bus-driver, Robert Smigel portraying Mr. Oblaski, Tim Herlihy (head writer at SNL) co-writing the screenplay with Adam and Norm McDonald playing his buddy Frank. Robert Smigel is known for doing those goofy cartoon sketches on SNL and for being the lips and voice of Bill Clinton on Conan O'Brien's TV "Late Show".
Review Date: June 25, 1999
Director: Tamra Davis
Writers: Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler
Producer: Robert Simonds
Actors: Adam Sandler as Billy Madison
Bridgette Wilson as Veronica Vaughn
Genre: Comedy
Year of Release: 1995
JoBlo's Movie Emporium
http://www.joblo.com/
(c) 1999 Berge Garabedian
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews