Faking It

CAST: Adam Sandler,Jennifer Aniston,Brooklyn Decker,Nicole Kidman

rating: **

Dr Danny (Sandler),with the big nose,has his heart broken right before the altar,‘cause he hears his bride talking about how she cheated on him. Dr Danny cancels the wedding,gets that nose fixed,and starts a new life. The rules of that life are simple: don a wedding ring,pretend you are in a horrible marriage,and walk away,consistently,with the best looker in the bar.

And while he is living the fake life,Danny doesn’t stop at it. The budding cardiologist changes direction to be a plastic surgeon,dealing in fake breasts,fake eyebrows,fake butts and others of the ilk. That not only leaves Danny a steadier stream of girlfriends,it provides us entertainment that comes not just in the form of a gravity-challenged breast but an overtly-ambitious eyebrow.

The best doctor in the right place to be,Los Angeles,Danny has his fun with those organs and is generally pleased with his life till,of course,one day the girl of his dreams walks into his life. An incredibly nice,improbably beautiful sixth-grade maths teacher,she is inexplicably at a Hollywood-ish party surrounded by patients medically enhanced some way or the other.

But Danny doesn’t question why,particularly when Palmer (Decker) seems to be as taken with him. The hitch is she wants to meet his shrew of a wife who he claims to be divorcing. Who should Danny turn to but his faithful,drab assistant in glasses,Katherine? And since that Katherine is Jennifer Aniston,there is involved an image makeover with designer wear — “she needs to look the part of a plastic surgeon’s wife” — and later a trip to Hawaii where the sexiest 42-year-old in the business (as the tabloids never let us forget) pits her bikini essentials inch for every inch against the 24-year-old Decker.

Here Katherine also meets an old college mate-cum-rival,the perfect Devlin (Kidman),who had made life miserable for her in the past. Devlin is married to the “man who invented the iPod”,and so Katherine now pretends,as well,to be the happy wife of Danny. One has to give it to Sandler and Aniston,while things can’t get more incongruous than this,they make the most of their roles.

However,the film,a remake of an adaptation of an adaptation,isn’t done with its fake quotient yet. There are also Katherine’s two kids,whom Danny passes off as his. Director Dugan,who seems to have hitched his career to Sandler’s,rounds Just Go With It off with a fake accent,straight out of Katherine’s daughter’s lips. Irrespective of which side of the Atlantic Ocean you are located,rarely would you have sympathised with the British more.