Movie Reviews

Max Simkin (Adam Sandler) repairs shoes. Not because he wants to but because his father used to do the same thing before he ran off. And his father’s father before him. And when Max is not working in the store, he’s taking care of his increasingly senile mother (Lynn Cohen). To say that this is not exactly the life he had in mind, would be something of an understatement.

But things change when Max stumbles across an old sewing machine in the shop’s basement that endows shoes with a strange power: when Max puts them on, he physically looks like the shoes’ owners. Max accepts this with amazing ease and starts to have a little fun with it for about five minutes before getting in trouble with a badass gangsta (Method Man) and an even badass-er landlord (landlady?), played by Ellen Barkin. Oh yeah, Dustin Hoffman is in this movie as well as Max’ dad. And because this is an Adam Sandler flick, Steve Buscemi had to pop up at some point as well.

I’m not sure what they were going for but holy crap, this is a bad movie! Director Tom McCarthy seems hellbent on constantly focusing on the least interesting bits and the entire movie is built around the whole walk-a-mile-in-another-man’s-shoes idea without knowing what to do with it except for introducing it. There is a twist at the end of the movie, but it’s too ridiculous for words. Kinda like the rest of the movie come to think of it.