Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights (2002)

If you're looking for the arrival of the first classic Hanukkah movie -- well, Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights isn't it. But that's not because it isn't sort of funny and sort of sweet, in between the more frequent times when it's sort of gross. It's because the movie is only about Hanukkah in a limited sense, enough to piggyback it onto Sandler's perennial hit "The Hanukkah Song," whose lyrics get a third incarnation here for the closing credits. Eight Crazy Nights instead follows a looser "redemption during the holidays" theme, but don't let that or the fact that it's animated suggest that it's for kids -- while its PG-13 rating is shy of the R given to the South Park movie, it's in that same category. The pre-repentant Davey Stone boozes, pretends to dry-hump a car, and knocks an outhouse down the hill, leaving its occupant covered in feces. If this all sounds pretty puerile, it is, but there's still a good heart and a couple laughs at the center of Eight Crazy Nights. Sandler's old man impression isn't that much different from how he'd sound if castrated, but he does a wickedly nasally take on the old man's sister, matching the character design humorously -- and disguising his own voice enough to create doubt that it's him. Another South Park similarity is that Sandler gets good mileage from the song he co-wrote with Allen Covert, including Whitey's primer on rules ("Technical Foul"), a musical intervention staged by mall mascots, and "Bum Biddy," an opera spoof performed at an awards banquet. The critics who trashed Eight Crazy Nights undoubtedly made good points, but it doesn't take a Sandler fan to find some fun in it. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide