Sandler, whose best work tends to be his least rewarded at the box office, has never before made a sequel. Here, Lenny must contend with the news that his wife ( Salma Hayek) wants to have a fourth child Eric, inexplicably, must keep his wife ( Maria Bello) in the dark about how much time he spends keeping his elderly mother company Marcus must make peace with the thuggish son he never knew he sired and Kurt … well, Chris Rock gets to ad-lib one or two funny lines and spend the rest of the film waiting for something better to come along.

Like the first film, this one is built upon the seriously misguided idea that five or 10 minutes of sentimental family-values talk can coexist with an hour and a half of burp-snarting and the like. PHOTOS: From Fat to Fit: 8 Funnymen Who Trimmed Down Instead, they spontaneously decide to throw an 80s-themed yard party, and in a couple of hours, half the town arrives in costumes that would have taken a week to assemble. A rivalry is born, though the adults don’t know they’re being targeted for destruction. Visiting a favorite swimming hole so Eric can dive off the cliff he always feared, they cross paths with a band of frat boys (led by Taylor Lautner), whose collective loutishness makes Sandler & Co. Soon the fellows are trying to make old bodies do what young ones never did. Together they pioneer new bodily functions (Eric’s “burp-snarting,” which may sound more amusing than it is) and fantasize about those they don’t get enough of: Attending their daughters’ dance rehearsal, they can’t stop gawking at an educator the credits helpfully dub Hot Dance Teacher. Set on the last day of school, the script follows as Lenny commandeers his kids’ bus (the driver, played by Nick Swardson, is high on pills) and, after dropping them and their schoolmates off, makes a day of it with his hooky-playing pals. Throughout, gags are cartoonishly broad and afforded so little time for setup and delivery we seem to be watching less a story than a catalog of tossed-out material.

The opening scene, in which a deer wanders into Lenny’s house, offers two separate occasions where the beast rears back on hind legs to urinate on someone the second goes on long enough to suggest someone has a fetish to indulge. Which is not at all to say that the humor has matured. PHOTOS: 26 of Summer’s Most Anticipated Movies

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