Two decades ago, when stupid Hollywood comedies were relatively smart, they lampooned their own sequelitis with titles like Hot Shots! Part Deux. The genre has become less knowing since then, so the follow-up to 2010’s Grown Ups is named simply Grown Ups 2.
Grown Ups Minus 2 would be more apt.
Like its predecessor, this is a vehicle for Adam Sandler, his pals and whatever they think they can get away with. That means some creepy sexual insinuations, if not so many as the first time.
But excreta and flatulence are the movie’s two true fixations (with projectile vomiting running a strong third). Indeed the story opens with a sequence in which a large male deer urinates copiously on not one but two of the characters. It’s a fitting introduction to the movie’s tone.
Rob Schneider couldn’t make it to the set for the second installment, it seems, but the other principals play the same roles as before. Sandler is Lenny, a Hollywood agent who’s now relocated to the small Massachusetts town of his youth, supposedly because it’s a more wholesome place for the three kids he’s raising with wife Roxanne (Salma Hayek).