The poster asks, "What if a little lie kept getting bigger?" More like, "What if the people telling the little lie kept getting dumber?"
Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston's romantic comedy, idiotic even by their usually low big-screen standards, is stuffed with unpleasant narcissists saying and doing the stupidest, often cruelest things in hope of cheap laughs.
They fail. There's barely a titter's worth of humor in this bloated mess that drones on for nearly two hours.
Director Dennis Dugan, whose many collaborations with Sandler include "Big Daddy" and "Grown Ups," lets scene after unfunny scene linger painfully as the characters blather dreary nonsense for minutes on end.
Based on Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and Goldie Hawn's 1969 comedy "Cactus Flower," the movie casts Sandler as Danny Maccabee, an unmarried, well-off plastic surgeon and supposedly nice guy who has spent two decades pretending to be a mistreated husband so he can score with sympathetic women (yeah, real nice guy).
Then Danny falls for schoolteacher Palmer Dodge (Sports Illustrated swimsuit goddess Brooklyn Decker). Rather than doing something silly, like telling Palmer the simple truth that he's interested and available, Danny enlists his assistant and longtime platonic pal, Katherine (Aniston), to pose as the wife he's divorcing so he can woo his new woman.
And the lame-brained lies build from there. Single mom Katherine's kids (Bailee Madison and Griffin Gluck) are drawn into the charade, along with Danny's randy cousin (Nick Swardson).
All three are annoying enough as their regular characters, but Madison and Swardson yammer in grating European accents much of the time as part of this shabby plot to con sweet and trusting Palmer into falling for a creep.
Sandler, also a producer on the movie, truly does come off as a creep here. His characters usually are crass but good-hearted, and while Danny utters the occasional nicety, he's just a big, nasty jerk.
Compounding things, the 44-year-old Sandler's boyish looks are really starting to erode, so Danny seems a bit like a pathetic old lecher pursuing 23-year-old Decker's Palmer (Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling's screenplay also provides no clues why the impossibly hot Palmer might fall, almost at first sight, for a middle-aged liar).
As the fibs pile up, characters keep uttering "just go with it," and it feels like a plea from the actors and filmmakers, hoping the audience will play along no matter how dumb things get.
The filmmakers contrive to send the whole gang on a weird, extended-family trip to Hawaii so they can show off some exotic scenery and sneak in shots of Decker glistening as she steps out of the ocean in a skimpy bikini.
In Hawaii, Katherine also encounters old college rival Devlin (Nicole Kidman), a pompous windbag who happens to be vacationing there with her equally insufferable husband (musician Dave Matthews).
Among the movie's many clumsy gags is a hula smackdown between Aniston and Kidman that, even though it offers grand views of their taut midriffs in action, manages to be really, really boring.
Kevin Nealon also has a sad little cameo as a plastic-surgery addict, but his makeup's so heavy, he's almost unrecognizable, so he has plausible deniability that he was ever in the movie.
How Kidman got roped into this dreadful affair is a mystery, but don't you make the same mistake. Just run from it.
"Just Go With It," released by Sony's Columbia Pictures, is rated PG-13 for frequent crude and sexual content, partial nudity, brief drug references and language. Running time: 116 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
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