A comedy of knee-jerk quirkiness, from Paul Thomas Anderson, about a major-league misfit impersonated by Adam Sandler. (E.g., he stockpiles Healthy Choice puddings for the promotional offer of frequent-flyer miles, although he never flies, nor does he eat pudding.) One hardly knows which is more of a shock: that the star of Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore turns out to want to play Hamlet, or that the maker of the two-and-a-half-hour Boogie Nights and the three-hour Magnolia can be content to make a mere ninety-minute movie. It's a cinch, in any case, that Sandler's character is not far enough removed from his usual nudniks, and that Sandler himself is not a good enough actor, for there to be any real edge to his temper tantrums, crying jags, bashful soliloquies, and whatnot. He always plays beneath himself; it's only a matter of how far. Even so, Emily Watson's romantic interest in him makes no more sense than Stella Stevens's or Jill St. John's in Jerry Lewis. The violent intrusion of a gang of phone-sex extortionists from Provo, Utah, is just a mark of Anderson's poverty of imagination and core of conventionality. One clever touch: the blue suit, white shirt, and red tie which everyone who knows our hero expresses surprise to see him wearing (almost a Pee-wee Herman ensemble, except no bow tie) are the only things we viewers ever see him wearing -- day after day after day. What's his normal attire? With Luis Guzman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mary Lynn Rajskub. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd