Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
WITH the biggest sporting event of the year done and dusted, you’d be easily forgiven for feeling a bit miserable at the prospect of having to wait another year before the glamorous Formula One train rides back into town.
You might even consider a trip to the cinema to watch a new comedy in the hope of cheering yourself up.
I’d urge you to stay at home.
I’m not kidding. Please, for your sanity’s sake, don’t go and see The Cobbler. It’ll only make you feel 10 times worse. In fact, digging out your old DVD copy of Schindler’s List or The Notebook and watching that instead would probably give you a more cheery feeling than this offering.
It’s a weird movie, with many different ideas cobbled (sorry!) together. But instead of creating a potent potion of sharp comedy and clever wit, this is a concoction of bad jokes, terrible acting in my opinion and cringe-worthy situations in one terrible mix.
The fact that, on paper, the film’s premise is actually decent makes the whole experience even more frustrating.
Max Simkin (Sandler) is a shoe cobbler down on his luck and down in life. As the film puts it in the most groan-inducing way, he repairs people’s soles, but it’s his own soul that needs repairing.
He lives with his sickly mother, who’s only desire is to see her husband (Max’s father Abraham, played by Hoffman) again. Alas, he disappeared many years before, bequeathing Max with his repair shop not to be seen again.
One day, an angry and forceful customer demands his shoes to be repaired in sharpish fashion. When Max’s machine breaks, he uses an antique machine in the basement that was apparently touched by an angel in a Jewish ceremony a century earlier. Yeah …
Anyway, Max discovers that the stitch from this machine allows him to become the people that those shoes belong to when he wears them. This obviously leads to him (unfortunately not us, the audience) having a ton of fun by engaging in activities like taking posh cars out for joyrides, having slap-up meals and not paying for the bills and picking up beautiful women.
It all sounds fun as Max tries to bring happiness to himself and his mother’s life, but the film is a mess. It’s disappointing that the film just descends into, well, it’s hard to even describe as ridiculous ideas and situations are thrown in to something quite undecipherable, but it’s just plain bad.
The film could have been clever and used this premise to more interesting effect if it had wanted to be, and would have been more watchable. But shifting between outrageous and serious on a whim just doesn’t work.
Sandler is an easy target to blame as he hasn’t made a funny movie since dinosaurs roamed the planet. Talk about ‘by-the-numbers’ acting, and Sandler is the prime candidate. But it’s not entirely his fault, the material and script he’s given really doesn’t help his cause.
Director Tom McCarthy seems to have had a wild night out with his friends and thought of ‘the 10 stupidest things we can fit into our next movie’, and took the bet with The Cobbler. They’re daft, make little sense and frankly I felt like giving up halfway through.
In fact, if it were not for the fact that it’s my job to sit through movies, be they spectacular or not fit to tie the big screen’s shoelaces, I would have left. And this is coming from someone who never gives up on something halfway through. It’s that bad.
The Cobbler is about as much fun as stubbing your toe or standing on a Lego block. Turn your heel and give this one the boot.
