Grown Ups 2

Here at The Ticket we try to avoid underestimating our distinguished readership. But we are willing to bet that no human being possesses the imaginative power to sufficiently lower his or her expectations to anticipate the sheer laziness of this putrid ensemble comedy.

If you've seen the original Grown Ups (a particularly large hit here in Ireland), then you may be prepared for the baseness of the exercise. It will come as no great surprise, for example, that the film begins with a moose urinating in Adam Sandler's face (not very funny, but certainly deserved). The Neanderthal sexual politics will also be familiar to Grown Ups veterans: a scene during which the girls ogle a fitness instructor makes it "okay" for their husbands to leer disgustingly at a lithe dancer.

The first film (in what I dearly pray will not become a trilogy) also introduced us to a take on family life that tries to reconcile utter conformity with a rampant disgust at the compromises that marriage and childrearing require. In short, you probably think you know how low the film-makers are prepared to sink.

Trust me. You have no conception of their vaulting ambitions in the field of conspicuous underachievement. Grown Ups 2 plays like the result of an experiment to discover if it is possible to write a film in less time than it takes to watch the finished entity.

You know how sequels are supposed to go. Maybe the four idiot friends and their four idiot wives will be forced to spend time in a haunted house. Perhaps Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade and Chris Rock will find a suitcase of money and squabble themselves into paranoid lunacy. Nope. They just drive around their awful neighbourhood and allow various pointedly unamusing things to happen.

High-brow Nepalese films about yak herders are more at home to tightly structured plot. They also tend to be funnier. And less boring. And livelier.

Oh, look. Just don’t go and see this terrible, terrible film. Is that clear?