Billy Madison

If you've ever had a yen to relive the third grade, this must be the next best thing.

Billy Madison is a textbook example of a half-decent idea that never got developed beyond the "lying around drinking beer and making jokes with your buddy" stage.

The latest entry in the American cinema's investigation of dumb-and-dumber heroes.

Where Dumb And Dumber was clever enough to play dumb to amuse the child in all of us, this suffers under the illusion that just having a central character blissfully unaware of the need for a brain is actually a funny concept.

Even on its own dim-bulb terms, this runt of a comedy never locates its central joke: Is it that Billy the child-man doofus doesn't fit in with his pint-size peers or that he fits in all too well?

Those unfamiliar with Sandler's antics may...begin to find him annoying sometime between the appearance of the Universal logo and the end of the opening credits.

The Adam Sandler milieu of male mistakes and fixation on frustration was perhaps never more concentrated than it was in his first film — which commits as deeply to its sincerity as it does to its rampant silliness.

Viewed as an absurdist comedy by many, Billy Madison is nonetheless the product of a director who specializes in cautionary tales about the temptations of sin putting one's soul in jeopardy.

Sandler, who shows every sign of having enough energy to make the grade, should forget about imitating Jim Carrey and find an act of his own.

...an exceedingly (and unabashedly) silly premise that's employed to mostly watchable (yet undeniably erratic) effect by Davis...