As I sat in the theatre watching Click in June of 2006, I couldn’t help but think that it should be December. Click has such an It’s a Wonderful Life/Scrooge feel to it that it seems like a holiday release. Like Spanglish and Punch Drunk Love, Click is another attempt by Adam Sandler to establish himself as an actor and distance himself from the frat-boy antics of Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy.

In Click, Sandler is overworked architect Michael Newman. He has all the trappings of success: a beautiful home, a pretty wife (Kate Beckinsdale), two adorable kids – and a boss from hell (David Hasselhoff) who keeps Michael so busy that he doesn’t have time to enjoy any of the fruits of his labor. One frustrating evening Michael realizes that the number of remote controls he needs to run his house is simply out of control. He goes out into the night in search of a universal remote control. Apparently, Bed, Bath and Beyond is open all night because it’s the only store open. There Michael runs into a kooky scientist named Morty (Christopher Walken) who gives him a truly universal remote (with one catch, he can’t return it). Soon Michael is fast forwarding through arguments, pausing time and decreasing the volume of the dog’s bark. But the universal remote isn’t just universal… it’s also intelligent. Sensing what Michael would want to pause or skip through, its start to act with a mind of its own. So Michael ends up with the remote control controlling his life.

There are glimpses of the old Adam Sandler – a fart joke and a humpy dog – but as the movie progresses it gets more serious in tone. Truthfully, I didn’t find the movie to be that funny at all and anyone expecting the over-the-top, purely comical Sandler is in for a big disappointing surprise. In fact, by the end of the movie, a lot of folks were in tears.

You see, the moral of the story boys and girls is that rushing through the bad parts of life may sound like fun but it also makes it harder to appreciate the good parts of life. We need to learn to take the good as well as the bad. In Click, we learn that lesson through a series of increasingly depressing revelations.

I have to say though, there were several elements of Click I found slightly annoying. We’re in the 21st Century. We can create epic battle scenes and brave new worlds with computers. We’ve made great strides in animation. Plastic surgery and prosthetics can recreate and redesign entire faces and bodies. Yet when it comes to making someone look significantly older or younger, the make-up still looks like crap.

Christopher Walken was also more than a little annoying. I thought his wacky Morty was a complete rip-off of Christopher Lloyd’s Dr. Brown in Back to the Future.

Surprisingly, David Hasselhoff stole most of his scenes and provided a great deal of the movie’s comedy.

Marketing Click as a straight up comedy makes sense if you want to attract Adam Sandler’s fan base. However, it is misleading. Click is not a typical Adam Sandler comedy. In fact, I would go so far as to say, it’s really not a comedy at all. It’s more of a drama with comedic moments. If you see it with that in mind, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.