Adam Sandler plays Michael Newman, an architect who cannot stop working long enough to watch his kids grow up. In Click, he gets a universal remote that doesn’t just run the television. It runs his life. He can pause an argument, mute his wife, skip traffic, and fast-forward past the parts he’d rather not sit through. The joke is obvious and the movie knows it. The problem is that the joke keeps being true.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
The Remote From Bed Bath & Beyond
Frank Coraci directed Click from a script by Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe. Sandler produced it with Jack Giarraputo, Neal H. Moritz, and Koren and O’Keefe. It opened in the United States on June 23, 2006, through Sony Pictures Releasing, and it runs 107 minutes. The premise is borrowed: the film is inspired by “The Magic Thread,” a folk tale in The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories. That’s a strange parent for a Sandler comedy, and it explains a lot about the last act.
Michael’s boss is John Ammer, played by David Hasselhoff, who takes credit and gives nothing back. Henry Winkler is Michael’s father, Ted. Julie Kavner is his mother, Trudy. Kate Beckinsale is Donna, the wife who keeps asking him to show up. Sean Astin is Bill. Three actors split Ben across the years — Joseph Castanon at 7, Jonah Hill at 17, Jake Hoffman from 22 to 30 — and two play Samantha, Tatum McCann at 5 and Lorraine Nicholson at 14.
Morty and the ‘Beyond’ Door
The remote comes from Christopher Walken. He plays Morty, a sales clerk Michael meets after wandering Bed Bath & Beyond, falling asleep on a display bed, and walking through the door marked “Beyond.” Morty hands over a prototype and warns that it cannot be returned. Walken delivers the whole thing like a man reading a warranty from another dimension, and the movie is better every second he’s on screen.
The mechanic is the sharp part. Morty explains that when Michael fast-forwards, his body stays on autopilot — it keeps moving through the motions while his mind jumps ahead. That single rule is what turns a gag into a trap. Michael uses the remote to cause mischief at work and to skip traffic, illness and arguments. Then he skips to a promotion Ammer has already told him to wait months for. The remote takes him at his word and jumps a full year.
What the Remote Learns in 2007
By 2007, Michael is in marriage counseling with Donna. The family dog, Sundance, has died and been replaced by a small dog named Peanut. The remote has now learned his preferences and starts fast-forwarding on its own whenever a problem appears — the exact problems he always skipped. He tries to get rid of it. It comes back.
This is where Click stops being a comedy about a gadget and becomes a movie about a man who trained his own life to run without him. The remote isn’t punishing him. It’s obeying him. The film is smart enough to know the difference, and Sandler is good enough to sell the panic that follows.
The Makeup Nomination
Click was made for $85 million and grossed $268.7 million. It received mixed reviews on release and was nominated for Best Makeup at the 79th Academy Awards. That nomination is not a joke. The film ages its lead character across decades, and the makeup work carries scenes the script can’t. Whatever you think of the movie’s jokes, the craft in those later sequences is doing real labor.
The cast list is doing labor too, and unevenly. Hasselhoff is a cartoon, which is the point, and he’s funny. Winkler gets one of the film’s few quiet scenes as Ted, and it lands because he plays it straight. Beckinsale has the hardest job — Donna exists mostly to be skipped — and she makes the frustration specific anyway. Jonah Hill shows up as teenage Ben for a stretch that mostly reminds you the movie has a Ben problem: three actors, no continuous character.
Where Click Actually Hurts
The structure is a mess. Click wants to be a broad comedy for an hour, then a moral tale about family for forty minutes, and it never quite earns the turn. The remote does the work of the writing. Every time the film needs Michael to feel something, it fast-forwards him into the feeling instead of building it. That’s efficient and it’s cheap.
But the cheapness is also honest. The movie’s real subject isn’t the remote. It’s the deal a workaholic makes with himself — that the missed recital and the cancelled trip and the argument he walked out of will all be worth it later. Click says later never comes, and it says it with a device that lets Michael watch the bill arrive in one jump. The folk tale underneath is doing exactly that work, and it survives the fart jokes.
The Verdict on Click
Click is a 107-minute movie with a 30-minute idea, stretched by a premise that keeps paying off in ways the script doesn’t deserve. The remote is one of the better comic devices of its decade because it has rules, and the rules have teeth. Walken is the best thing in it. Hasselhoff is the second best, for worse reasons. The ending goes soft exactly where it should go hard, and the mixed reviews it got on release were fair.
What holds up is the mechanic. A man builds a machine that skips the parts of his life he doesn’t want, and the machine learns him so well it skips everything. That’s not a fantasy. That’s a description of how most people use a phone. Click got there in 2006, wrapped in Sandler’s voice and a Bed Bath & Beyond joke, and it’s still the sharpest thing in the movie.
KEY FACTS
– Release date: June 23, 2006 (United States)
– Director: Frank Coraci
– Writers: Steve Koren, Mark O’Keefe
– Runtime: 107 minutes
– Budget: $85 million
– Gross: $268.7 million
– Academy Awards: nominated for Best Makeup, 79th ceremony
– Score: 6.3/10
The case for the remote, in order:
1. It has rules — autopilot body, skipping mind — and the rules hold.
2. It learns Michael’s preferences and turns them against him.
3. It cannot be returned, which is the whole point.
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