50 First Dates: Critic Reviews

The stars have a goo-goo chemistry that's hard to resist.

What starts out looking like another crude, bullying Adam Sandler extravaganza ends up as a surprisingly graceful and impressively daring romantic comedy.

50 First Dates is working awfully hard to be romantic and not hard enough to be a comedy.

50 First Dates possesses an undeniable heart. The bad news is that it will still be buried underneath layers of stale Sandlerisms tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

A chick flick for guys, with a pH balance in perfect equilibrium between the crass and the sweet.

50 First Dates wants to have it both ways, but only one of them really works.

Ends up making you pine for Lucy's gift of forgetting.

A terrible movie by all reasonable standards -- yet it leaves a sweet taste.

Great date-movie material if you can keep your date from bolting during the first half.

The film could have made a solid Saturday Night Live skit, but the closest it gets is serving as a reunion for onetime cast members.

50 First Dates offers a seductive vision of a quirky love. But there is a note of melancholy at the conclusion of this mixed bag of the compassionate and the crude.

The movie doesn't have the complexity and depth of Groundhog Day, but as entertainment it's ingratiating and lovable.

Sandler's movies always have combined juvenile humor with sentimentality, but the two rarely have seemed so out of synch.

I don't think 50 First Dates is a great movie, or a particularly funny one, but I admired its romanticism and its gentle plea for the acceptance of difference.

Entertaining? Forget about it. The film is less toxic than most Sandler vehicles, but so is anthrax.

The only people likely to be disappointed will be those who bother to wonder how good 50 First Dates could have been.

A drab Groundhog Day retread.

Stupid, coarse and abysmally unfunny.

Vast majority of the humor is so grotesquely obvious and crudely presented (in addition to being mildly crude in and of itself) that Sandler dissenters are guaranteed to remain just where they are.

About 25 too many.

Surprisingly sweet.

If there's one thing to commend in 50 First Dates, apart from the finest walrus performances this side of Marineland, it's Barrymore, whose irrepressible cheerfulness and buoyancy at least makes Henry's motivation anything but mysterious.

Crude, lewd and shameless? You bet.

Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore shine in this sweet, flirty comedy about a man who falls for a woman with short-term memory loss.

50 First Dates stays bravely true to its unresolvable premise.