Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore have chemistry. That was true in The Wedding Singer, and it is true again in 50 First Dates, the 2004 romantic comedy that director Peter Segal built around a premise designed to break it. Barrymore’s Lucy Whitmore cannot keep a new memory past a night’s sleep. Sandler’s Henry Roth has to win her over every morning from scratch. The film knows this is a good idea. It does not always know what to do with it.
Trailer, via Sony Pics at Home.
Henry Roth and the Hukilau Café
Henry is a marine veterinarian at Sea Life Park Hawaii on Oahu. He dates tourists on purpose, so nothing lasts. His friends are Ula, a marijuana-smoking Islander; Alexa, his androgynous assistant; Willy, his pet African penguin; and Jocko, a walrus at the park.
His boat breaks down one day. While he waits for the Coast Guard at the Hukilau Café, he meets Lucy, an art teacher building architecture out of her waffles. He assumes she is a local, which stops him from running his usual routine.
The next morning they connect over breakfast. She offers to meet again. The morning after that, she has no idea who he is.
Goldfield’s Syndrome
Sue, the café manager, explains it. A year earlier, Lucy and her widowed father Marlin drove to the North Shore to pick a pineapple for his birthday. A cow wandered through a broken fence onto the road. The crash left Lucy with Goldfield’s syndrome, a fictional form of anterograde amnesia.
Lucy remembers everything up to the night before the crash. Her short-term memory works fine during the day. Sleep wipes it. She wakes every morning thinking it is Sunday, October 13.
To spare her, Marlin and her brother Doug re-enact Marlin’s birthday every single day. Doug is a lisping, steroid-dependent bodybuilder. Marlin is a professional fisherman.
Henry keeps trying. He offends her once, follows her home to apologize, and meets Marlin.
The supporting cast is a problem the film never solves:
- Rob Schneider as Ula, Henry’s wealthy native Hawaiian best friend, unhappily married and father to five athletically talented children
- Sean Astin as Doug, playing the lisp and the steroids at full volume
- Lusia Strus as Alexa, Henry’s ambiguously gendered Eastern European assistant
- Dan Aykroyd as Dr. Joseph Keats, a physician specializing in brain disorders
- Allen Covert as Ten-Second Tom, a hospital patient with severe memory impairment
Schneider and Astin are doing broad comedy in a film that wants a tender center. The two modes sit next to each other without ever blending.
What the Premise Costs
The film was shot mostly on location in Oahu, on the Windward side and the North Shore. That choice is the smartest one in it. The water, the light, the café — the setting does work the script keeps fumbling.
Sandler and Barrymore won an MTV Movie Award for Best On-Screen Team. It is the second of their three collaborations, after The Wedding Singer and before Blended, both directed by Frank Coraci. Here Segal has the weaker material.
The premise sets a trap. Lucy cannot grow. Every day she resets to the same Sunday, October 13, so the relationship can only move in one direction: Henry’s persistence. The film treats that persistence as romance. It is also a man building a life around a woman who cannot consent to it in any lasting way, and the movie never wants to look at that.
Here is how the film’s own mechanics stack up against what it asks of an audience:
| Element | What the film does | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Lucy’s memory | Resets every night | No accumulated arc for Barrymore |
| Henry’s courtship | Repeated daily | Repetition stands in for development |
| Marlin and Doug | Re-enact a birthday daily | Comic bit outlasts its joke |
| Oahu locations | Shot on the Windward side and North Shore | The best thing in the film |
Barrymore is the reason any of it lands. She plays Lucy as warm and unguarded, and she never lets the condition turn into a punchline. Sandler is softer here than he usually allows himself to be. Their scenes at the café are the film’s real argument for itself.
The end credits carry a dedication to the memory of Sandler’s father Stanley, who died at 68 from lung cancer on September 9, 2003. It is the one moment in 50 First Dates that earns its sentiment without reaching for it.
The film was a commercial success despite mixed reviews. It was remade in India as Satyabhama in 2007 and Ormayundo Ee Mukham in 2014, in Japan as 50 First Kisses in 2018, in Iran as Chap dast in 2005, in Mexico as Como si fuera la primera vez in 2019, and in Thailand as Henry’s First Dates in 2026. A premise this sturdy travels. That is not the same as a movie this good.
The Verdict on 50 First Dates
50 First Dates has a strong hook, two leads who genuinely like each other, and a Hawaiian shoot that makes the whole thing easy to watch. It also has a script that mistakes repetition for growth and a supporting cast that keeps breaking the tone.
The premise is the star, and the premise is not enough for 99 minutes. The film never asks what Henry is actually doing, and it never lets Lucy be anything other than the thing that happens to him. That is a real limit, not a quibble.
Worth one watch for Barrymore. Not worth the second, and the second is the whole point.
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