50 First Dates (2004) Review

Official trailer

50 First Dates is pretty fun. It’s a Sandler comedy, so you get the gross-out jokes, the goofy sidekicks and Rob Schneider doing a voice, but underneath all that it’s a sweet little love story with a premise that gives the romance something to push against every day.

Peter Segal directed it from a script by George Wing, and it reunited Sandler with Drew Barrymore six years after The Wedding Singer. It opened in February 2004, cost about $75 million and made roughly $196 million worldwide. Audiences liked the pairing as much as they had the first time.

It’s a 7. The jokes are hit and miss and some of them haven’t aged well, but the two leads are charming together and the film has more heart than most comedies of its kind.

I had a better time with this than I expected to.

Sandler dials his shtick down far enough to be likable, Barrymore is lovely, and the premise gives the romance a daily obstacle that feels sweet instead of gimmicky. What holds it at a 7 for me is the crude stuff. Schneider’s Ula wears thin fast, and a few gags feel like leftovers from a dumber movie.

The Setup

Henry Roth is a veterinarian at an aquarium in Hawaii who has built his love life around tourists. He romances women who are flying home at the end of the week, so nothing ever has to last. It’s a cozy arrangement, and he’s very good at it.

Then he meets Lucy Whitmore at a local diner, where she’s building a little house out of her waffles, and he’s hooked. They hit it off, and he comes back the next morning expecting to pick up where they left off. She has no idea who he is.

Lucy was in a car accident a year earlier that damaged her memory. Every morning she wakes up thinking it’s the day of the accident, and every night the day she just lived disappears. Her father and brother have spent a year re-staging that same Sunday so she never has to learn what happened to her.

One Day, Over and Over

The premise turns courtship into a puzzle. Henry has to make a stranger fall for him before bedtime, every day, and he tries everything: staged car breakdowns, fake fights, cheesy pickup lines, a whole run of first impressions. Some work and some flop, and the film has fun cycling through them. Think of it as a romantic comedy version of a time-loop story, except the loop belongs to her. He remembers every failure and every success. She gets a clean slate, so each good day is a gift he can’t keep.

That imbalance gives the film its sweetness. Henry, the guy who ran from commitment, ends up choosing the one relationship where he’ll have to start over forever.

I think that’s the smartest thing the script does. Henry remembering everything while Lucy remembers nothing gives every good day a little ache, and I found myself rooting for him harder than I usually bother to in a Sandler picture.

Sandler and Barrymore

Sandler is at his most likable here. Henry is a bit of a heel at the start, and Sandler lets him soften without turning him into a saint. You believe he’s a guy who’s never had a reason to stay, and then you watch him find one.

Barrymore is the reason the film works. Lucy has to meet the same man for the first time again and again, and Barrymore makes every first meeting feel fresh. She’s funny, a little odd and completely open, and the moments when Lucy learns the truth about her accident are the most affecting in the film.

The two of them have an easy, warm chemistry that carried over from The Wedding Singer. They’d pair up a third time years later in Blended, but this is the one where the partnership fits the story best.

The Supporting Crew

Rob Schneider plays Ula, Henry’s stoned Hawaiian buddy, and he’s either very funny or very grating depending on your tolerance for Schneider. Sean Astin plays Lucy’s brother Doug, a steroid-fueled bodybuilder with a lisp, and Blake Clark plays her protective father, who’s worn out from a year of pretending it’s the same Sunday.

I’m in the grating camp. Ula feels like he wandered in from a lesser Sandler movie, and I’d have cut half his scenes to give Barrymore more room to work.

Dan Aykroyd turns up as Dr. Keats, the brain specialist who explains Lucy’s condition, and plays it mostly straight. Lusia Strus plays Henry’s assistant Alexa in a string of odd little gags.

Then there’s Jocko the walrus, who gets the biggest laughs in the film, along with a penguin and a sea lion who all seem to have better timing than some of the humans. The aquarium animals give the movie a running supply of slapstick, and the walrus, especially the scene where he gets sick, is pure Sandler comedy at its silliest.

Hawaii

The film was shot on Oahu, and it looks like a vacation. Sea Life Park, the beaches, the waterfalls and the little diner where Lucy eats breakfast every morning all give the movie a bright, easy feel that suits the story.

The setting also explains Henry. He lives somewhere people come to visit and then leave, and he’s built his whole life around that. Lucy, who can’t leave her one day, is the first person who stays.

Segal shoots it all in warm, saturated color, and the camera lingers on the water the way a tourist would. It’s hard to imagine the film working as well in a gray city. The island makes the romance feel like a gift, and that’s exactly what each of Lucy’s days is.

The Memory Question

Lucy’s condition is loosely modeled on real memory loss but isn’t a real diagnosis. People with anterograde amnesia usually can’t form new memories at all, and they don’t reset neatly overnight. The film bends the science to make the romance work, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.

What it does well is the emotional side. The scenes where Lucy’s family has to watch her relearn the same bad news, and where Lucy discovers they’ve been re-creating one day for a year, are sad and kind in equal measure.

Henry’s solution is a videotape he makes for her to watch every morning, walking her through the accident, the year she’s lost and who he is. It’s the cleverest idea in the film, and it turns the premise from a gimmick into a plan for a life.

The videotape changed my mind about the film. It’s a practical, loving idea, and I like that Henry solves the problem with patience instead of a miracle cure. That’s the moment the movie stopped being a gimmick for me and became a love story I cared about.

The Ending

Lucy decides she can’t ask Henry to give up his dream of sailing to Alaska to study walruses, and she breaks it off. She wipes him from her journal. He leaves, and then he finds out she’s been painting his face over and over without knowing who he is. He comes back, and the last scenes show them on a boat heading north. Lucy wakes up, watches her morning tape, and learns she’s married to Henry and they have a daughter. Then she goes up on deck to meet her family. It’s corny, and it works. It lets the film end happy without pretending her condition has gone away, and it makes Henry’s promise, to start over every day for the rest of his life, the real romance of the story.

Craft Note

Is 50 First Dates worth watching?

Yes, if you like Sandler’s romantic comedies. It’s pretty fun, it’s sweeter than you’d expect, and Barrymore makes Lucy easy to root for. Some of the humor is crude and dated, and Schneider’s character won’t work for everybody.

I give it a 7 because Barrymore, the walrus and that morning videotape take it further than the jokes deserve. I’d happily put it on for a lazy evening and fast-forward through Ula. With a sharper comic script it could have been an 8, but the heart is real, and I’ll take a sweet Sandler movie over a mean one any day.

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