one of my absolute favorites!

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Billy Madison is an older Sandler film of his 1990 era. Sandler plays the title character Billy, an irresponsible whose father (Darren McGavin) is a wealthy hotel mogul ready to retire. His father wants to turn over the business to his son, but Billy spends his days drinking and messing around with his friends.Of course this film is very silly and over the top and that is its intention completely, The inevitable scenes of a full grown man sitting in a too small chair set the tone for the rest of the film. When Billy hits third grade, he falls for his teacher (Bridgette Wilson), and when he makes it to high school and is tortured by the other kids, he remembers how badly he treated kids back when he went to school the first time. Ultimately the film is quite silly and predictable though it does contain several laughs. It starts out very rough and quite boring then becomes generally better in the middle.

Billy Madison (Adam Sandler) is the selfish obnoxious heir to a multi-million pound hotel chain that was set up by Billy's late mother and his father Brian Madison (Darren McGavin). Billy's father is set to retire soon and opts to leave one of his employees Eric Gordon (Bradley Whitford) in charge of his business upon his retirement. Billy objects to this believing that he should be placed in charge of his father's business. Brian doesn't believe that Billy is responsible enough or smart enough to run the business but agrees to give him full control of the business if he can pass grades 1-12 in 24 weeks. Eric wants the business for himself and will stop at nothing to ensure that Billy fails this challenge.Even if you're prepared to ignore the obvious flaws in the plot (a father handing his business over to his selfish and obnoxious son who has no business acumen and has had no prior involvement in running the company merely on the strength of him graduating from school. A teacher falling for a man-child re-running grades 1-12 who is even more immature than the kids who he attends school with) then the film still isn't very good. For the most part it relies on Sandler being in OTT mode and doing his utmost to make his character as irritating as possible. This is great from an 'acting' perspective, but ultimately makes him difficult to endure across the running time.The idea of Sandler graduating 12 years worth of school in a matter of weeks certainly isn't a bad one and perhaps would have worked better if more thought would have been put into the concept. I personally felt that it would have been funnier if the film would have shown more examples of Billy failing and struggling his way through school - I found it perplexing that Billy was portrayed as being rather simple-minded from the outset, but yet the film also represented him as a bit of a smart-ass at times which was puzzling. He seems to get through each school year far too easily and there also seemed to be a big continuity gap as well (at one point he seems to jump about 4 school years in one go!!!!) I also wasn't impressed by the fact that Sandler kept the majority of the focus on him (he has a whole host of children as supporting actors, but gives them absolutely nothing to do). It perhaps would have been better if he'd given a couple of the youngsters more defining roles so that he would have had people that he could have bounced off and built up something more in the way of a rapport with some of the youngsters. It seems rather arrogant and unfair for Sandler to give the rest of the cast so little to do (he clearly thought at this point in his career that he was strong enough to carry this sort of project on his own, but he simply can't and it really shows here).The film also substitutes intelligence and insight in favour of Sandler's overacting to the ninth in a performance that was more irritating than funny. He has a lisp in this film (like his character had in The Waterboy) but in Billy Madison it seems to come and go at will.Naturally with this type of plot there has to be a bad guy and the bad guy here is Eric who stops at nothing to prevent Billy from prevailing at the challenge that he's been set by his father and naturally sets about trying to scupper Billy's chances of succeeding. In this instance it is the head teacher that is used as a plot device as Eric digs some dirt on him (although the reveal here is imaginative it is utterly ludicrous and not even remotely believable). There are also things in here that feel a bit random - such as an impromptu sing-song which felt more at home in a musical and a final act that again was more stupid than funny.The only scene I actually liked was the 'peeing in the pants scene' and that was because that scene actually contained something in the way of pathos and actually had something to say (it's a pity there were not more examples of this in the rest of the film). I also thought Bradley Whitford put in a solid performance as Eric and most of the time I found him fun to watch. However, these are the only real positives I could find in this film.I'm not someone who is normally an 'Adam Sandler' hater (heck I'm one of the few people who defended the first 2 Grown Ups films), but Billy Madison is really lame and relies far too much on Sandler mugging and being OTT which unfortunately isn't enough to carry the film or make it worth watching.

"Billy Madison" delivers a reasonable number of laughs despite massive and potentially crippling problems with the script, characters and plot. About 80% of the jokes and gags either fell flat or were cringe-worthy from my perspective; however, there were many jokes that worked for me and others may find mirth in some of the jokes I failed to appreciate. It was sufficiently frustrating that I had to pause the movie several times; however, it had enough goofy comedy that I resumed play. Among the many faults with the movie: It fails to deliver what Blake Snyder calls the promise of the premise. Billy doesn't actually complete twelve grades. He simply survives two weeks of classes at each grade level. Very little of his classroom experiences could be described as academic. It's very repetitive, so much so that many of the grades are simply skipped in the narrative. His blow-out graduation parties at his father's mansion also become repetitive. It might have been a stronger film if he had simply returned to complete twelfth grade or first grade. In line with this, we meet many characters who are involved briefly then disappear and there's little logic to why some characters who return at later stages. The antagonist, the self-serving CEO, never really increases the stakes. He's largely passive and reactive, except for hatching one plot that is quickly subverted. The romantic subplot is not believable, although this could be said for many comedies in the category Snyder labels fool triumphant. It's not really a fool triumphant movie, as Billy rarely offers a perspective of the world from the eyes of an innocent. Billy doesn't have a credible or meaningful character arc. Initially, his character is a totally unsympathetic self-indulgent incompetent sybarite. He has some insights into human character, but isn't the typical idiot savant, like Gump, Clouseau or English. He doesn't learn much of anything beyond rote memorization of historical dates. He never develops any reasoning or problem-solving skills. At the conclusion, Billy makes a surprise announcement that isn't much of a surprise. Many of the issues and subplots are resolved not through the actions of the protagonist, but through either the failings of other characters (such as the Jeopardy game) or a deus ex machina outcome (the come-uppance of a bully). The relationship between Billy and his father needs more work. Billy doesn't really need to complete twelve grades. His need is to win back his father's respect. His father is indulgent to a fault. But he has not been able to build a huge empire with sixty thousand employees without understanding people. His inability to understand either Billy or the CEO seems implausible. As McKee wrote. Comedy is king. The plots of the Marx Brothers' movies were simply threadbare excuses for a lot of their shtick. But people don't watch a Marx Brothers movie to see an intricate plot unfold. They want the goofball comedy. BM could have been a much better film and it's frustrating that, like Billy, it never rose to its full potential. But it managed to provide sporadic laughs. Technical aspects were more than adequate. The film also benefits from the participation of talented actors and comedians in supporting roles.

There are few if any comedies that lack a story as much as Billy Madison does. The plot basis is slightly redemptive, but the actual story structure is flimsy at best. But, as we've seen happen before, the film is still appealing to a number of viewers and is pretty successful. I mean, let's face it, no matter how bad a movie is, it's guaranteed to make a lot of money if Adam Sandler is in it. Even if most of his movies are essentially the same thing with a different subject matter and he's not a stellar actor, people will go to see it or rent it.So, the basic plot is that man-child Billy Madison has to go back through first to twelfth grade to prove to his dad that he can run the family hotel business. What little story there is comes with the character of Veronica Vaughn, and the fact that her name sounds like it comes from an old Bond film pretty much shows how much depth her character has. The antagonist, Eric, tries to steal the company from Billy like how Rob Lowe's character does in Tommy Boy. Apart from those story engines, the movie is pretty much just propelled by the irony of a grown man going back to elementary school. The academic decathalon climax, while sort of funny, isn't at all impressive from a storytelling perspective.Billy Madison's character has a pretty distinct personality, and we see that even though he's the biggest goofball you can find, there is some kind of intelligence behind all of his superficial stupidity. He doesn't have any real arc, apart from maybe proving himself to have some kind of intellectual dignity by the end. Eric is a fairly standard-issue greedy villain that makes a fool of himself for the amusement of the audience. His gags can be funny, but they aren't very original or clever. Billy's dad, while important in a plot sense, is hardly present in terms of screen time. Veronica Vaughn has some kind of personality, but is really just put in as the improbably love-interest for Billy. I thought Miss Lippy, the first grade teacher, was probably the most accurately portrayed stereotype in the whole movie, and her line about the "importance" of dodgeball is pretty funny. Even though he wasn't a very prominent character, I want to briefly mention the bus driver since he was probably the best combination of acting (thanks to Chris Farley) and scripting. His part really stole the show for me, but that's not to say that he should have had more screen time. The other minor roles are Carl, the gay ex-wrestler principal (whose entire character probably should have been cut for the sake of the story and the sake of all gay people), Juanita the maid, Billy's two friends, and the few kids that Billy befriends during his time in school. Most of them contribute one or two good lines and maybe a more extended gag.The comedy has a consistent goofy tone to it and feels a lot like Happy Gilmore, although the Gilmore humor hit it's mark a little better than this did. I can't think of one scene throughout the entire movie that isn't included to generate some kind of comedy, and in some ways that might make amends for the poor story. Some of my favorite jokes were the running "O'Doyle rules!" thing, the Broadway spoof when Veronica comes to help get Billy back on his feet, every scene involving the bus driver, and the "t-t-today junior!" scene. I think they could have cut the drunk penguin hallucination scenes, everything involving the principal, and could have spent a little more time in middle school instead of third grade since that could have provided some prime comedic situations.The acting is probably the strongest executional point. It isn't Oscar worthy, and all of it is very overblown and excessively goofy. The script definitely could have used some work, but it's protected by the comedy genre and the decent acting.If you like some of the older Sandler movies, being anything pre-Mr. Deeds, then I would recommend renting this at the cheapest price you can find. If you have doubts about whether you'll like it, watch up to the end of first grade, then go with your gut on whether to continue. It's borderline as a family film. Most of it is PG level, but there's a couple of scenes that you might want to mute or skip with your ten-year old. If you don't have any actor preferences, I will only caution that you're not in for any mind-blowing cinema, but you might get a few laughs out of it if you can get past the low-intelligence atmosphere. Overall Rating: 8/10.