3 / 10
Click is a film with a good premise and no idea what to do with it. Adam Sandler plays an overworked architect who gets a remote control that works on his life, and for about half an hour it’s the comedy you’d expect. Then it turns into a film about dying, and it never recovers.
Frank Coraci directed. Kate Beckinsale plays the neglected wife, Christopher Walken plays the salesman who hands over the remote, and Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner play Sandler’s parents. It cost about $82 million and made roughly $240 million, so audiences turned out.
It gets a 3. The tonal whiplash is the main problem, and the jokes on the way there are the usual mid-2000s Sandler material: dog jokes, fat jokes, fart jokes, then a speech about family.
The Setup
Michael Newman is an architect who works constantly, misses his kids’ lives and keeps promising his wife he’ll slow down after the next promotion. He goes looking for a universal remote at a big-box store and ends up in a back room marked Beyond, where Morty hands him one for free.
The remote works on reality. He can mute the dog, fast-forward a traffic jam, pause an argument, skip an illness. At first it’s a toy, and the early sequences get a few real laughs out of it.
Then the remote starts anticipating him. It learns what he skips and does it automatically, so whole years vanish while he’s on autopilot, and he wakes up further and further from the life he was supposed to be living.
The Premise Is Good
Stripped of everything else, the idea is solid. A man who wants to skip the difficult parts of his life gets to, and discovers that the difficult parts were the life. That’s a real story, and it’s been told well elsewhere.
The film even finds the right images once or twice. Michael fast-forwarding through dinner with his family, present but absent, is a decent bit of satire about the way people treat their own lives as an obstacle between promotions.
A better film is visible underneath this one. That’s part of why the finished version is so frustrating.
For Writers
Click has a premise strong enough to carry a good film and buries it under material that fights it. A story can survive weak jokes, but it can’t survive a tone that contradicts its own argument. When you write, check that your comedy and your theme point the same direction, and cut the gags that undercut the thing you’re trying to say. Read your funniest scene next to your most serious one. If the reader would need to forget the first to believe the second, one of them has to go. You don’t get to spend an hour undercutting a theme and then ask for tears.
The Tonal Collapse
The last act abandons comedy completely. Michael skips through a divorce, his father’s death, his own decline and a hospital bed, and the film asks the audience to weep over a man it has spent an hour watching mute a dog.
The father scene is the clearest case. Henry Winkler is good in it, and the writing is aiming for something real, and it arrives twenty minutes after a joke about a neighbor’s breasts. Nothing survives that gap.
Sandler has done the serious turn well elsewhere, in Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems. Here the shift isn’t earned, and the film reaches for tears it hasn’t worked for.
The Jokes
The comedy is the standard Sandler package of the period: bathroom humor, a lot of material at the expense of how people look, and a supporting cast asked to be humiliated on cue.
Christopher Walken is the exception. He plays Morty like a man from a different, stranger film, and every scene he’s in wakes the picture up. David Hasselhoff, as the boss, commits fully to being awful.
Kate Beckinsale is stranded. The wife exists to be neglected and then grieved, with no interior life of her own. It’s a waste of a capable actor and one more sign the script only cared about one character.
The Sandler Problem
By 2006 Adam Sandler was running two careers at once. One made Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy, broad comedies built on a man-child screaming at people. The other had made Punch-Drunk Love in 2002 and proved he could carry serious material when a real director shaped it.
Click is an attempt to do both inside one film, and it shows what happens when the two don’t get separated. The comedy undermines the drama and the drama sours the comedy, and neither half gets the performance it needs.
He would get it right later. Uncut Gems in 2019 is the best acting of his career, and it works because nobody asked him to mute a dog for laughs in the middle of it.
For Writers
Click asks one performer to play broad comedy and a deathbed scene inside the same ninety minutes, and the tone never settles. A character can change across a story, but the rules of the world they live in can’t keep flipping. When you write, decide how seriously your world takes itself and keep that steady, even when the mood of a scene shifts. Read your book’s funniest page and its saddest page back to back. If they feel like two different novels, the world needs one set of rules.
The Ending
Michael dies in the rain in a parking lot, begging his son not to repeat his mistakes. It’s played completely straight, and it’s the film’s emotional peak.
Then he wakes up. None of it happened. The remote is on the counter, the family is intact, and he chooses differently. It’s a reset button, and it costs the story everything it had just spent twenty minutes building.
A film can earn a second chance for its hero. This one doesn’t. It stages a death, takes the tears, and then cancels the bill.
For Writers
Click spends its last act killing its hero and then undoes it with a dream reset, so nothing the audience felt is allowed to stand. An ending that cancels its own consequences teaches the reader that nothing in the book mattered. When you write, decide whether your character’s loss is real before you ask the reader to grieve it. If your ending restores everything your protagonist lost, ask what they’re left carrying. If the answer is nothing, you’ve written a dream, and readers will feel cheated. They’ll also stop trusting the next loss you put in front of them.
Why It Made Money
The film opened in the summer of 2006 with a broad hook and a star at the height of his commercial run, and it earned about three times its budget. Audiences liked the premise, and plenty of people report being moved by the last act.
It also picked up an Academy Award nomination for makeup, for the old-age work on Sandler and the rest of the cast. That’s the one craft element in the film beyond argument.
None of that changes the picture itself. It’s a 3: a good idea, a couple of decent scenes, Walken doing something strange and interesting, and a film that tries to buy sentiment it never earned.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Click wants to be a broad comedy and a tearjerker at the same time, and the two halves cancel each other out. Tone is a promise to the reader, and breaking it late costs you everything you built. Decide what kind of book you’re writing early, then let the jokes and the grief live in the same world instead of taking turns.
Is Click worth watching?
Not really. The premise is interesting and Christopher Walken is fun, and everything around them is crude comedy welded to melodrama, with an ending that cancels its own stakes.
The box office says plenty of people disagreed with me, and the makeup nomination was deserved. None of that makes the film work.
It’s a 3. If you want Sandler doing something serious, Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems are the films. If you want the premise done properly, almost any good story about a man missing his own life will serve you better.
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