Directed by: Robert Marianetti, Robert Smigel, and David Wachtenheim
Distributed by: Netflix
Written by Patrick Hao
70/100
During the first few years of Adam Sandler’s Netflix deal, it seemed like an easy cash grab from an actor as auteur whose best work was far behind him. “Ridiculous Six,” “The Do-Over,” “Sandy Wexler,” and films from Sandler cohorts like the “The Wrong Missy” all pointed to the years-long decline in respectability, with the common refrain on Sandler’s career being that he just makes movies for his friends to go on vacation. Yet, in the last five years, starting with the wedding comedy “The Week Of,” Sandler’s original comedies for Netflix have paradoxically matured their juvenility in a way that has evolved the Sandler persona to a new type of endearing figure.
None is more emblematic of that than Sandler’s latest Netflix feature, the animated movie “Leo.” The film, about an elementary school pet lizard, Leo (voiced by Sandler), who at the ripe age of 74, finds out that he may be in the final year of his life. Realizing his own impending mortality, he endeavors to finally explore outside the fifth-grade classroom whenever he is taken home for the weekend by one of his students. However, instead of leaving, Leo finds himself talking to the myriad of children and helping them through their problems with the lessons he has learned observing the various children that have passed through the classroom.
Leo, the turtle, has the hallmarks of this new type of Sandlerian hero. Leo is older and experienced without being too cool the way the worst of Sandler’s Late 2000s and early 2010 films are. The sentimentality is coming from a lived life instead of the cloying tugging of the heartstrings nature of “Click” or “Big Daddy.” Sure Leo is giving children advice like listen more and ask questions, you don’t have to live up to the ideals of your parents, or maybe it is best to not let a literal helicopter drone dictate all of your life actions, but the age demographic that “Leo” is targeting is pointedly for the fifth graders.
I have not even mentioned that the film is a musical and the songs are great. The songs written by comedy icon Robert Smigel (who co-directed and co-wrote the film with Sandler and Paul Sado and Smigel also co-directed) are consistently funny and chocked full of gags while also being Sondheim-esque in their lyrical complexity and the way they convey pre-pubescent comic neurosis. The song “When I Was Ten,” a lament to the passing of blissful ignorance contains a lyric triplet that gave me the hardest laugh in any 2023 film (“When I was five/ I didn’t care that people died/ A haircut used to make me cry way more).
The CGI animation itself is a little garish. It does not have the fluidity of a Pixar movie nor does it have Genndy Tarkovsky animated physical comedy dexterity that the “Hotel Transylvania” movies had (although the recurring bit of the kindergartners being animated to be all head and eyes running around like a hurricane was never not funny). But “Leo” more than makes up for it in its earnestness and gags. Adam Sandler has come a long way since “Eight Crazy Nights.”
“Leo” Trailer
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