Grown Ups

This topic contains:

• overall comments and recommendations
• details of classification and consumer advice lines for Grown Ups
• a review of Grown Ups completed by the Australian Council on Children and the Media (ACCM) on 24 June 2010.

Overall comments and recommendations

About the movie

This section contains details about the movie, including its classification by the Australian Government Classification Board and the associated consumer advice lines. Other classification advice (OC) is provided where the Australian film classification is not available.

ACCM review

This review of the movie contains the following information:

• a synopsis of the story
• themes
• use of violence
• material that may scare or disturb children
• product placement
• sexual references
• nudity and sexual activity
• use of substances
• coarse language
• the movie’s message

A synopsis of the story

Thirty years after winning their basketball final in 1978, five friends find themselves suddenly reunited when they return to their hometown for the funeral of their old coach. Lenny (Adam Sandler) is a wealthy Hollywood agent with three spoiled children and a beautiful wife Roxanne (Salma Hayek), who is a world class fashion designer. Eric (Kevin James) is also married with children, but is on a somewhat downwards spiral. Kurt ((Chris Rock) is a house husband who doesn’t feel appreciated by his wife or children. Marcus (David Spade) is still behaving like a teenager, while Rob (Rob Schneider) is on his third marriage to a woman old enough to be his mother. In order to complete Coach Buzzer’s funeral ceremony by spreading his ashes, the five men and their families spend the Fourth of July weekend together at a lakeside lodge which was a favourite place when they were growing up. 

During the weekend we see the five men rediscover their friendship and undergo a lot of soul searching, while their children discover just how much fun life can be life without cell phones, and videogames. The men are also challenged to a basketball rematch with the boys, now men, who they defeated in 1978.       

Family relationships; mid-life

 

Grown Ups contains infrequent slapstick violence and accidental harm. It also contains frequent psychological violence in the form of demeaning insult and ridicule. Examples include:

• During a basketball match we see a young boy bump into and knock over another young boy.
• A young boy plays a video game call “Cruise Ship Wars”, the aim of which is to run around a cruise ship and decapitating people with a chain saw. We hear that you get extra points for tipping grandmother over the ship’s rail and see images from the game with blood splattering across the screen and people being shot.
• A man picks up a heated rock used for therapy and screams in pain. He places it on a woman’s back and she screams.
• A pre-school aged girl becomes distressed when she sees moths being zapped buy an electric bug zapper. We see a woman stepping on the dead moth and see its squashed remains on the ground.
• When a young girl sees a rope on a tree, she makes the comment, “we get to hang ourselves”.
• We see Lenny slap Rob across the face (several times) in a demeaning manner with a piece of dried banana and then with a packet of bacon.
• In reference to Lenny’s son’s misbehaviour, we hear Lenny say that his father would have a back-hand to the face with possible bleeding from the ear.
• Five men play a game called “Arrow roulette”, which involves on of the men firing an arrow into the air with then men running away before the arrow comes down with the last man to run away being the winner. As the men run away, one runs into a tree branch and is knocked off his feet, one trips over a tree stump and lands face first in animal faeces, one of the men refuses to move and has his foot impaled by the arrow. We see the arrow impaled through the man’s foot and blood around the wound, with the man fainting when he sees the arrow through his foot; he is carried off by two men and we later see his foot bandaged.
• Rob is shot in the foot with an arrow and his wife attempts to provide assistance by suggesting a poultice. Rob tells her to “Get some alcohol on this, bitch” and then fires a string of hurtful and demeaning insults at her relating to her age, looks and abilities.
• Throughout the film Lenny and his friends continuously taunt each other with mean-spirited, derogatory slurs relating to appearance, weight, ethnicity, life styles, eating habits, children, monetary status, sexual relations, age, physical abilities and deformities. For example one person is referred to as “fugly” (fucking ugly), a while another is referred to being an “Elvis Oompa Loompa”, whose hair looks like a dirty cue tip.
• A man attempting to ride a flying fox while hanging upside down, crashes heavily through the side of a wooden building and we see him later wearing a full body plaster cast.
• Rob kicks Marcus hard in the groin, twice causing Marcus to collapse on the ground in agony. 
• An intoxicated man shoots an arrow high into the air at a crowded outdoor basketball game with the crowd shouting and running away. The falling arrow impales the foot of a man who is wearing a full body cast and is unable to run away. He falls backwards unconscious. 

Material that may scare or disturb children

In addition to the above-mentioned violent scenes, there are some scenes in this movie that could scare or disturb children under the age of five, including the following:

• We see an elderly woman show her swollen infected looking bunions; a young child screams and runs away when they see the woman’s bunions.

Children in this age group are also likely to be disturbed by the above mentioned scenes.

Apart from the above mentioned violent scenes, there are no scenes in this movie that are likely to scare or disturb children aged eight to thirteen.

Little to disturb this age group

Product placement

The following products are displayed or used in this movie:

• Video games, hand held video machines, Wii, Cadillac, Budweiser beer, KFC, bottled water-Voss and mobile phones.  

Sexual references

Grown Ups contains frequent sexual references, innuendo and double entendres. Examples include:

• While playing in a basketball match, a young boy (eleven years) winks suggestively at a young girl watching in the stands. Another young boy does the same thing, but when the girl nods her head in response, the boy shakes his head and nods his head at the girl’s mother.
• We hear a man say, “Oh your wife’s into chicks”.
• We hear a woman ask a man if he was the one who didn’t reach puberty until nineteen.
• We hear an 11 year old boy  telling another that he is going to Italy and that they show “boobies” on Italian TV     
• Five men discuss whether you can have sex with a woman when she is pregnant.
• A man talks about having sex with his wife while she was asleep.    
• We hear how a man told his young child that babies come from his mummy’s “poop” and hear how the child kept looking for a brother in the toilet.
• A man watching a woman using a breast pump comments that the image was making him “horny”.
• A group of woman refer to a man’s small tight fitting swim suit as a “banana hammock”.   
• We hear a man dancing with his wife tell his wife “This song makes me so horny”. He tells his wife that he had “made-out” with twenty five other women on the very spot they were dancing on, and that he wanted his wife to be number twenty six. 
• A man talks about having sex with a young woman. The bed was shaking and the woman hit and cut her head, but that he didn’t stop
• When a man complains about his family not appreciating him, a woman comments “Looks like it’s his time of the month”.
• A man insults another man and his partner by saying that their love making resembled grizzlies fighting over a salmon.

The film also contains “toilet humour” involving farting and urination. There are also a number of scenes involving breast feeding, including:

• A four-year –old boy approaches his mother and says “I want some milk” His mother uncovers her breast and allows the child to drink from her breast. (The boy’s head obscures her breast.) Other mothers with shocked expressions cover the eyes of their children when they see what the boy is doing. In a later scene, the same boy looks at another woman’s exposed cleavage and asks his mother if he could have some of her milk. 

Nudity and sexual activity

There is some nudity and sexual activity in this movie, including:

• Lenny says to Rob, “you cool with a finger up you” and then reaches behind Rob and sticks his finger into Rob’s clothed buttocks.
• Rob and his much older wife kiss each other on the lips and touch tongues. Two men watching the pair pretend to gag. In a later scene Rob straddles wife and the pair rub noses. 
• In one scene we see a back view of Marcus’s naked buttocks
• A young woman in very short shorts bends over a car with the camera focussing on her buttocks and crotch from behind. Four men in deck chairs deliberately stare at the woman as she bends over and decide to “take shifts” looking at her buttocks.
• While at Water World, a group of women stare at a bare-chested muscular man wearing   small, tight shorts. The man flexes his muscles to attract the women’s attention. One of the women tells the others, “There are two big advantages to breast feeding”. She then does a seductive pole dance around an umbrella to attract the man’s attention.      
• After sliding down a waterslide a young woman exits the water with the camera focusing on her buttocks, with her bikini  resembling a G-string. Two young boys stare at her.
• A man asks a pregnant woman if he can touch her belly saying that he likes to touch the baby. He touches the woman’s breast by mistake. When the woman says “That’s my booby, he says, “Yeah I like to touch those too”.

Use of substances

There is some use of substances in this movie, including:

• A man behaves in an intoxicated manner at his young son’s basketball celebration. His son says, “You’re drunk dad”.
• A group of men discuss how they used to go to a lakeside lodge to get “wasted”, their children overhear and ask what “getting wasted” means, to which the parents respond, “eating ice-cream”. One young child says that he wants to get wasted every day of his life.
• Men drink  beer out of bottles on a couple of occasions.
• On several occasions, Marcus drinks shots of bourbon and behaves in a very intoxicated manner unaware of his actions. At one stage we see Marcus dancing while holding a bottle of bourbon, acting as if the bottle is his dance partner. While at a crowded public gathering in an intoxicated state, Marcus fires an arrow into the air causing panic.  

Coarse language

There is some coarse language, modified swear words and putdowns in this movie, including:

• “Pissed me off”; “suck a dick”; “dummy”, “losers”, “shiz’n fine”, “arse wife”, “fugly”, “crap”, “turd”, “bitch”

In a nutshell

Grown Ups is a comedy that relies almost solely on crude humour, sexual reference/innuendo and demeaning insults to entertain.

The main positive messages in the film are:

• Childhood is a time for imaginative play and physical activity rather than being caught up in violent videogames and texting.
• Life can be difficult, but it’s the bumps in life that give it depth.
• In the word of Coach Buzzer, “Live life with no regrets”. 

However, parents may find that these messages are overshadowed by the crude humour and the way in which characters treat each other

• Parents who allow their children to see this film may wish to discuss
• the disrespectful manner in which the main characters in this film talk about and view women
• the harmful and demeaning manner in which the men ridicule each other.