Adam Sandler stars in this family friendly tale of what happens when your bedtime stories start to come true … with amusing consequences.
Marty Bronson (Jonathan Pryce) had a great love for his hotel business and his son shared it. The problem was that Jonathan had love, but didn’t have a head for business. Mr. Nottingham (Richard Griffiths) comes in, buys out Jonathan, but promises that one day he might give Jonathan’s son a chance at running the hotel.
Years pass and Nottingham has grown his chain into a success. Skeeter Bronson (Adam Sandler) still lives in the hopes that he might get his chance at running the hotel. Until then he’s employed at the Nottingham flagship hotel as a maintenance man.
Skeeter’s sister Wendy (Courtney Cox) is having to go out of town for a job interview and needs him to watch her kids, Patrick (Jonathan Morgan Heit) and Bobbi (Laura Ann Kesling), during the night because her friend Jill (Keri Russell) is taking a night class. Wendy’s kids have been raised in a gluten-free, politically correct environment and that’s nothing that Skeeter can stomach.
During Skeeter’s first night with the kids, he tells them a bedtime story reflecting his bad day at work populating the tale with his pal Mickey (Russell Brand), Mr. Nottingham’s Paris Hilton-like daughter Violet (Teresa Palmer), his rival Kendall (Guy Pearce), and other faces from his job.
He wants to give the tale a sad ending, but the kids insist that the hero, looking much like Skeeter, get a second chance and it rain gumballs. Come the next day, Skeeter does get a second chance in reality and it does rain gumballs on his way home from work.
So now Skeeter tries to rig the bedtime stories so that the items that seep into reality will put him on top of the hotel business, but things don’t go the way he envisions them.
Bedtime Stories marks Adam Sandler’s attempt to make a more family friendly product at the House of Mouse. It’s only a middling effort with Sandler doing his patented mugging, just a bit tamer than usual. The film does feature a bevy of famous faces, but some of them are given little to do.
I enjoyed the mad Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but he isn’t given much to work with in this film. He’s his usual wacky self, but I wonder if he was just cast because of his rising star and kept in the background lest he start telling some dirty jokes?
My kids thought the star of the show was a CGI enhanced hamster named Bugsy. Its definitely been put in the film to keep the smaller rugrats interested, but to me it felt too obvious that was why the little critter was there.
We’re not really given any reasoning for why the bedtime stories are bleeding into reality, but we may be given hints. Skeeter’s dad narrates the film and during the big finale Skeeter starts talking to him, leading me to believe that his ghost is guiding Skeeter from the beyond via the bedtime stories.
The resulting film is a bit saccharine, but the kids enjoyed it. It was an okay snack for my sweet tooth, but my critical eye didn’t like recognizing that audiences were being catered to with all the cutesy stuff that was being done for cutesy’s sake.
Bedtime Stories is presented in a 1080p high definition transfer (2.35:1). Special features are brief, but all presented in high definition. The 4 minute “Until Gravity Do Up Part” is about the stunt work that went into the space arena scene. The 5 minute “To All the Little People” focuses on the child actors.
The 3 minute “It’s Bugsy” is about our cuddly, CGI enhanced co-star. There are also 6 minutes of outtakes and 10 minutes of deleted scenes. You also get some sneak peeks at upcoming releases and the disc is BD-Live compatible (if you’re player is). Disc two is a digital copy and disc three is a DVD copy of the film (a feature that I happen to like – keep ‘em coming).
Bedtime Stories has a certain charm, but it bothered me that I kept seeing copyright symbols after every bit of it (meaning that it was done to charm purposely and somewhat ham-fisted). I’m probably in the minority since my kids had a fun time. I did enjoy myself with Bedtime Stories. I just forgot about most of it when I woke up.
Bedtime Stories [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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