Director Thomas McCarthy is known for his realistic and touching human stories that depict people for who they really are, so the fact that he is responsible for The Cobbler is a real mystery. Adam Sandler stars as Max, a cobbler who works at the family business that has been passed down to him for four generations. After discovering that his shoe repair machine has a magical quality that allows him to literally “walk in another man’s shoes” and embody the person whose shoes he is wearing, his otherwise mundane life gets turned upside down.

The premise of this film sounds interesting at first glance, but the execution of the concept is done so extremely poorly that this movie feels like it is trying to play a joke on its audience. There is almost no character in this whole film; Max is just another guy who has no prospects in life, and instead of using his powers for good, he just aimlessly becomes other people with no real purpose. He finds himself in a real situation however after he becomes Leon (Method Man) a man who is caught up in crime. There’s this whole sub-plot involving an evil woman trying to evict an old man out of his home so that she can take over the property and that comes to play later in the film, but even that feels so boring and useless to be anything that an audience would care about. The film is rarely funny, is insanely ridiculous, and for the Adam Sandler “drama” that most people will go into this film expecting, it’s a joke possibly more offensive than half of the D rate movies Sandler himself has been churning out for the last few years. It’s quite shocking that anybody thought this film was a good idea, and it’s unfortunate considering the premise could have been utilized for a much more thought-provoking film.

[star v=1]