It's my distinct pleasure to share with you yet another presumed tax write-off from the good folks at Happy Madison. Adam Sandler has spent the past decade, or so, creating a tidy cottage industry of tricking movie studios into giving him money to take his friends on vacations, and Blended sees him pull this scheme with his frequent costar, Drew Barrymore.

As an onscreen couple, Sandler and Barrymore created two of Sandler's most warmhearted efforts, with The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates. It's discouraging, then, to be confronted with the trailer for Blended, which literally begins with Barrymore spewing French onion soup all over the place. The soup-spewing moment caps off a disastrous first date between our two leads, and simultaneously caps off any desire I might have had to continue watching this preview. Being the intrepid journalist I am, however, I soldiered on.

Explaining how these two single parents both find themselves and their children on the same African vacation may require some kind of flow chart, but let it be said that it seems to involve a mutual friend of theirs apprently having EIGHT plane tickets that he suddenly couldn't use. What fresh Groupon bullshit is this?

And now, we find ourselves in Adam Sandler's comfort zone: shaky racial politics, deadeningly unfunny slapstick and cloyingly maudlin melodrama. Any illusions that might have remained that Sandler is, in some way, superior to Tyler Perry, should be summarily stricken from the record. At least Perry writes and directs that garbage; Sandler just breeze through in basketball shorts on his way to the bank.

I'd rather watch a million trailers for shitty found-footage horror schlock than site through the entirety of Blended. To make one man feel so gross in two minutes is, in some way, a laudable achievement, but not one to be celebrated. Blended is like the invention of weaponized chlorine gas: I guess it's neat that you managed to create it, but did society really need it?