Don't let the fancy clothes fool you.
2002-06-28
$50.0M
96 min
When Longfellow Deeds, a small-town pizzeria owner and poet, inherits $40 billion from his deceased uncle, he quickly begins rolling in a different kind of dough. Moving to the big city, Deeds finds himself besieged by opportunists all gunning for their piece of the pie. Babe, a television tabloid reporter, poses as an innocent small-town girl to do an exposé on Deeds.
Decent watch, could watch again, and can recommend.
This has all the hallmarks, and cast, of most typical Happy Madison productions, but with a lot of money involved, both in the characters and the production value. I think this is the movie where John McEnroe started getting involved.
The character work in this is either drastically good or drastically bad, and they definitely experimented with some ideas they had in the backlog.
The "rags to riches" trope crossed with the "NYC is a cesspool of money corruption" trope is actually inspired. There is a great script in this movie, behind all the Sandler style humor, but that humor does make it fun, I just wish there was an adjustable setting sometimes.
Ultimately anything that isn't funny or charming in this is brief enough that you can overlook it pretty easily.
