Published: January 08, 2009 11:08 am      

Sandler plays it safe in ‘Bedtime’

Film Review

Comedian Adam Sandler plays a hotel handyman who stumbles upon a way to make his dreams come true in “Bedtime Stories,” Disney’s live-action entry in this holiday season’s box-office sweepstakes.

Babysitting his niece and nephew, Skeeter Bronson (Sandler) discovers his tuck-in stories become reality when the kids add their own nonsensical touches to the tales. So he spins colorful yarns of chariot races, damsels in distress, rugged cowboys and futuristic space duels, all the while trying to manipulate the stories to shape the outcomes of things he’d like to see happen in real life.

Specifically, he wants to win the affections of a sexy, spoiled, Paris Hilton-like hotel heiress, and he yearns for a plum spot in resort management, a position for which he’s competing against the heiress’ haughty boyfriend.

That’s a solid enough launching pad. But “Bedtime Stories” fails to blast off into the flight of imagination you might expect from such an imaginative-sounding premise.

We never learn where the story-time magic comes from, or how it works. Skeeter’s epiphany that his “damsel” is actually his sister’s pretty schoolteacher friend (Russell), not the hotel hottie, comes with zero surprise. And there’s nothing fresh in Sandler’s role that you haven’t seen in almost every movie he’s ever done. It’s the same mumbly, underachiever-schlub notes he’s been hitting for years, only taken down a notch for his first PG-rated comedy.

British funnyman Russell Brand, the randy rock star in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” has a more kid-centric role here as a loopy room-service waiter. Richard Griffiths, Uncle Vernon from the “Harry Potter” movies, is a stuffy, germaphobic hotel magnate who’ll stop at nothing to expand his empire. Lucy Lawless, best known as TV’s “Xena, the Warrior Princess,” plays a snooty desk clerk.

Much of the laughs, however, are for Bugsy, a hamster with outrageous, impossibly large eyes. When the movie needs a chuckle, it cuts to Bugsy, typically doing things hamsters don’t typically do — working out on a treadmill, eating a hamburger, showing off his new hair braids. It’s silly, but it’s also a troubling sign: You know an Adam Sandler comedy is in trouble when it keeps returning to a bug-eyed, computer-generated rodent for laughs.