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Bedtime Stories Our rating: Your rating:   MPAA rating: PG (for some mild rude humor and mild language) Genre: Comedy, Family Theater release: December 25, 2008 by Walt Disney Studios Directed by: Adam Shankman Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes Cast: Adam Sandler (Skeeter Bronson), Keri Russell (Jill), Courteney Cox (Wendy), Jonathan Morgan Heit (Patrick), Laura Ann Kesling (Bobbi), Russell Brand (Mickey), Guy Pearce (Kendall Duncan), Richard Griffiths (Barry Nottingham), Teresa Palmer (Violet Nottingham), Lucy Lawless (Aspen), Jonathan Pryce (Marty Bronson) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Here are five words you probably never thought you'd hear in the same breath: "An Adam Sandler Disney movie." At first, it may seem counter-intuitive that a comedian as juvenile and, occasionally, crude as Sandler would be working in Uncle Walt's name. It may seem even stranger when you notice that his best friend is played by Russell Brand, who recently played an oversexed rock'n'roll star in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and has since caused a controversy or two, by mocking the Jonas Brothers for their virginity at the MTV Music Video awards and by making lewd phone calls while hosting a British radio show. But on a certain level, the pairing of Sandler and Disney makes sense: if Sandler is just an overgrown kid, then a movie made for kids, about bedtime stories that come true, should be right up his alley, provided of course that he can keep things clean. And surprise, he does, more or less.

Bedtime Stories is, itself, told as a bedtime story, as the voice of Jonathan Pryce addresses the audience over the opening credits (he tells us to "hold it in" if we missed our chance to go to the bathroom first), and the credits themselves play over a pop-up book that depicts parts of the movie that we are about to watch. Pryce himself appears in a prologue as Marty Bronson, a kind and thoughtful man who runs a motel with the help of his son and daughter—but when the money runs out, he has to sell it to a developer named Barry Nottingham (Richard Griffiths, best known now for playing Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter movies). Marty does, however, get Barry to promise that his son, Skeeter, can run the motel when he grows up.

Adam Sandler as Skeeter

Fast-forward a few decades, and Skeeter, now played by Sandler, is definitely not in charge of the business, which has grown into a large hotel under Barry's ownership. Skeeter is, in fact, a run-of-the-mill handyman, fixing faucets and light bulbs while trading barbs with a snooty concierge named Aspen (Lucy Lawless). But when Barry announces plans to open an even bigger, even better hotel in the near future, Skeeter hopes to be involved somehow—and his hopes are immediately dashed when Barry puts his daughter's boyfriend, a slimy corporate creep named Kendall Duncan (Guy Pearce), in charge of the new development.

Meanwhile, Skeeter's sister Wendy (Courteney Cox) is going through a rough patch: her husband just left her, and she was recently laid off from her job as principal of an elementary school. Since she has to go to Arizona for a job interview, she asks Skeeter to look after her kids, Patrick (Jonathan Morgan Heit) and Bobbi (Laura Ann Kesling), in the evening, while her friend Jill (Keri Russell) looks after them during the day—and because Wendy doesn't own a TV and all her storybooks are politically correct fables like The Organic Squirrel Gets a Bike Helmet, Skeeter is compelled to invent bedtime stories of his own, with some extra details thrown in by his niece and nephew. And the next thing he knows, those bedtime stories start coming true.

Jill (Keri Russell) and Skeeter hit it off

No particular explanation is given for why the stories come true; there is no magic spell or supernatural object involved—unless Bugsy, the guinea pig with the eyes so big a computer had to animate them, is responsible for this somehow. (The bell he rings in his cage does have a certain fairy-tale sound, but this coincidence is treated as a joke more than anything else.) We do, however, know two things.

First, when the stories come true, there is usually a "natural" explanation, so you could almost write these incidents off as mere coincidence (when gumballs rain down on Skeeter, it is because he stopped under a bridge where a truck bearing gumballs got into an accident)—though it's harder to explain why, say, a bunch of grown-ups would suddenly feel the urge to do the hokey-pokey around a restaurant table.

Guy Pearce as Kendall, Lucy Lawless as Aspen

And second, the parts that come true tend to be the bits that were thought up by the children, rather than Skeeter—so when Skeeter tries to take advantage of this gimmick, by telling stories in which people give him job promotions or lots of money, the kids thwart him inadvertently by coming up with even goofier ideas.

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