Slap shtick film rivals

They call them the Frat Pack: Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, brothers Owen and Luke Wilson and Will Ferrell. Whether binge drinking at keggers and streaking through the neighborhood or crashing weddings for their inexhaustible supplies of low-hanging amorous fruit, they yearn to extend their college daze just a little bit longer.

That isn’t enough for their comedy rivals, the Slap Packers — Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and pals like “Saturday Night Live” alum Kevin Nealon and indie darling Steve Buscemi. They’re taking the Peter Pan approach to screen comedy. They won’t grow beyond early adolescence until they’re dragged, kicking and screaming, into a quasi-adulthood.

Is there room for two competing packs? Given the box office tallies from each, the answer appears to be yes.

At first glance, the packs appear to be cut from the same cheesy cloth. Neither works clean nor tidy. Check out the Frat Packers’ hard R antics in “Wedding Crashers” and “Old School.” Their bawdy humor matches the “Deuce Bigalow” films, which couldn’t stuff any more phallus gags in if Howard Stern were behind the camera.

Yet both groups have their warm, fuzzy sides.

Mr. Sandler’s “50 First Dates,” “The Wedding Singer” and “Big Daddy” all tried tugging our heartstrings.

The Frat Packers have a heart, too.

“Wedding Crashers” suffers from a case of chick-flick-itis in its waning moments, and “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” proved as sentimental as a comedy involving grown men hurling wrenches at each other can be.

Where the groups diverge is in their core appeal.

Mr. Sandler didn’t perfect that annoying, man-boy warble back on “SNL” for nothing. He routinely plays grown men who still think they’re 13, or maybe 10. His characters tend to grow a bit at the end of his films, but they remain child-like visions of what adults should really be. His slapstick humor, hardly more advanced than the broad physical shtick of the Three Stooges, represents the little boy in us more at ease pinching the girls than asking them out.

Sidekicks like Mr. Schneider and Mr. Nealon are on hand as playmates for Mr. Sandler’s inner child and suffer some serious body blows along the way.

All for a laugh, of course.

The Frat Packers appear to follow a similar path, but their antics embody other repressed yearnings.

Take “Old School,” which on the surface follows three pals who want to recapture their youth by pledging a middle-age fraternity. What the film really illustrates is not the urge to regress, but a dissatisfaction with the adult world.

The film’s truest moment comes when Mr. Ferrell’s Frank tells a group of college beer chuggers that he has to get up in the morning to hit Home Depot and other home fix-it stores. What adult can’t relate to the numbing thought of hours wasted examining paint cans and brushes?

Story Continues →