Big Daddy

When loser law-school grad Sonny Koufax (Adam Sandler) adopts a five-year-old boy named Julian (Cole and Dylan Sprouse) to impress his girlfriend, there's no suspense as to how this movie will pan out. Guy gets child but loses girl, guy bumbles through child-rearing process, guy gets attached to child as he learns about the value of fatherhood, guy goes to court (and uses all the tricks he learned in school) to try and keep child as his own.

This is no Waterboy -- the quotable one-liners are minimal, and Sandler uses his normal voice almost the whole time. But Sandler's at his best when he's doing little-boy-trapped-in-man's-body, and he and the Sprouse twins, the weally cute human equivalents of Fievel the Mouse, make adorably amusing playmates. Sandler has only two working facial expressions, amusement and anger, so he wisely avoids any serious emoting until the very end. In the meantime, he trusts that people will laugh as he teaches a young, impressionable child to pee on walls and injure rollerbladers. And laugh they do.

-- Jumana Farouky