If anything, it’s impressive in that it gets progressively worse. Or rather, The Cobbler fails to make us care. those scumbag landlords? I don’t know, but more importantly, I just don’t care.

The Cobbler continually makes one ask the same question: What is the point of this movie? Is it a modern Yiddish fable? Comedic fantasy? Sandler vs. But holy crap does McCarthy stitch this thing together something awful. Jeez, given Tom McCarthy’s contributions to the script of Up, maybe this would’ve been best suited for animation, a sort of modern fairytale in the city. There’s something resembling a cute idea in here, about a magic shoe stitcher. Loaded with good intentions, and executed with bad choices, Cobbler has clear trouble finding footing as it veers from socially serious New York story to goofy magic story to a no-bull superhero premise. Somewhere, Going Overboard is sighing with relief it’s just that cruddy. The Cobbler is truly it: Adam Sandler’s biggest flop and most embarrassing movie.

Well, there have probably been more foolish ideas for a movie. A series of poor New Yorker actors who can’t be on Law & Order anymore have to look wide-eyed in disbelief for Sandler’s weird little identity crisis.Īnd he uses the stitcher to skip on bills and incidentally save his neighborhood? He becomes a larger cross-dresser, a thin African American man, a Latino with a goatee and forehead tattoos, and of course, Method Man. To clear this up, we get a montage of stitching shoes and becoming other people. So, Simkin, a schlubby shoe man with a pickle habit, can be a teenage boy or even a corpse if he wears their shoes after repairing them? He discovers the spaghetti Jesus stitching machine in his store’s basement and finds out that when he works on a pair of shoes with that machine, the shoes turn magical, allowing Simkin to become the person who owned those shoes. Adam Sandler is a shoe repairman in New York. So there’s this stitching machine sent down to Brooklyn from angels? Let me get this straight.

The Cobbler's Boy by Elizabeth Bear