Eight Crazy Nights 2002

It’s slim pickings in terms of Chanukah films and specials for Jews to watch around the holiday season. Sure, there’s great Chanukah-adjacent films like An American Tale, and tepid faux-exploitation schlock like The Hebrew Hammer, but for the most part, we’re left with the stellar Rugrats Chanukah Special and a handful of amusing SNL sketches. That makes the abject terribleness of Eight Crazy Nights all the worse, because it promises a film centered around the Hebrew holiday to match its gentile brethren and delivers a steaming pile of crud that Judah Maccabee wouldn’t dignify by spitting on.

The film stars Adam Sandler as both Davey Stone, a 33-year-old alcoholic miscreant in a small New Hampshire town, and Whitey Duvall, the kindly and diminutive old man who’s responsible for supervising Stone’s judge-mandated community service (in one of those impromptu courtroom deals that only seem to happen in sitcoms and broad comedies). The film’s trajectory is clear from the beginning – the repugnant jerk Stone will reveal a heart of gold and a change in his demeanor through the magic of the holiday season. It’s a holiday story as old as A Christmas Carol.

The problem is that Eight Crazy Nights is never interested in doing the heavy lifting of that transformation. The film is far more devoted to reveling in Davey’s current bad behavior and cruel pranks than it is in laying the groundwork for his growth as a character. Stone is relentless in his general jerkassery, to the point that his alleged redemption is too little too late.

Instead, the film is content to offer up a little tragedy, one decent act from its protagonist, and call it a day. [Warning: spoilers for a movie that’s not worth being unspoiled for coming up.]. When Whitey reveals that Davey’s parents died in a car accident during Chanukah when he was just a kid, its meant to account for his all-around boorish behavior. And while the film reaches emotional peak, however stunted that may be, when Davey finally reads the Chanukah card his parents gave him that day and lets himself cry, it’s an unsatisfying bit of manipulative schmaltz delivered in the midst of a movie that hasn’t earned it.

That’s a common problem here – a lack of earned emotion or catharsis. Eight Crazy Nights goes through the motions of the holiday transformation story, but it’s perfunctory, without the sort of character work or commitment to it to make it anything more than a hackneyed skeleton to hang the film’s array of dumb jokes on. Davey’s never shown to have truly changed, simply sticking up for Whitey in his hour of need, and then presto change-o everyone accepts that he’s a different person, including his trophy of a thinly-drawn love interest. And despite his worthwhile dramatic turns in Punch Drunk Love and even Funny People, Sandler doesn’t have the chops to overcome the deficiencies of the script and sell the transformation in his performance.

But hey, undercooked plots filled with emotional shortcuts is nothing new in a holiday special, and could perhaps be forgiven if there were anything else redeeming about the film. Instead, it’s an absolute wasteland of music, animation, and most of all comedy.

The comic sensibilities of Eight Crazy Nights can basically be summed up in one simple sentence – “poop is funny.” As a fan of South Park I’m not above enjoying puerile or scatological humor, but the film’s approach is essentially that the existence of feces is humorous in and of itself, and no further amount of thought or wit need go into a scene to make it worthy of your laughs. That’s the general lazy ethos of the film’s comedy writ large, which even when it’s not showing a group of deer streaming out crap for no reason, devolves into easy stereotypes, crudeness in lieu of cleverness, and the sort of dumb gags that stop being enough to amuse by the time you make it out of middle school.

By the same token, the film’s music is pretty abysmal, which becomes a problem when the viewer realizes, to his creeping horror, that it’s meant to be a musical. Sandler rose to prominence on Saturday Night Live due to his musical stylings, and it’s the famed “Chanukah Song” on that very program that gives this movie its name. But while Sandler’s goofy, occasionally dada-ist lyrical style has a certain charm when it’s realized in a scruffy guy with an acoustic guitar, that tack craters when it’s ginned up into full Disney-esque orchestration.

Sandler’s compositions can’t quite stand the Beauty and the Beast treatment the film is so painfully aping. Of the film’s many overwrought, less-than-engaging songs, only “Technical Foul,” an amusing but inessential trifle in the dead center of the film, rises above “passable” or even “decent.” The rest of the soundtrack is a combination of weak comic lyrics that match the rest of the film’s poor attempts at humor, or ballads and showstoppers meant to offer emotional catharsis that never comes.

The same goes for the film’s animation. While there are some nice touches here and there (the golden glow amid the steely tones of winter meant to represent an idealized past is a particularly canny choice) for the most part, Eight Crazy Nights is unpleasant to look at. The film can’t decide whether it wants to go for a Disney-esque semi-realism or devolve into pure slapstick cartoonishness. The result is a film that, at times, looks almost unnervingly rotoscoped in the characters movements, but which also feels grotesque in the way it attempts to marry that aesthetic with Looney Tunes-inspired antics.

Nothing about Eight Crazy Night works. Whether it’s the story, the characters, the music, the animation, or the comedy, it fails on every measure. Sandler and company should be lauded for trying to offer a Hebrew take on the holiday classic, but the film he produced is so terrible, so unpleasant, and so poorly done that even for a market starving for something both Jewish and festive, he shouldn’t have bothered. The film is an insult to Chanukah, an insult to Jews, and beyond that, an insult to movies.