Quartile rating: 5.5/10 · 1 rating
When Longfellow Deeds, a small-town pizzeria owner and poet, inherits $40 billion from his deceased uncle, he quickly begins rolling in a different kind of dough. Moving to the big city, Deeds finds himself besieged by opportunists all gunning for their piece of the pie. Babe, a television tabloid reporter, poses as an innocent small-town girl to do an exposé on Deeds.
Mr. Deeds is a loose remake of the 1936 Capra classic, transposed into an Adam Sandler comedy vehicle. The plot is formulaic and telegraphed — naive good-hearted outsider corrupted/manipulated by city slickers, romance redeems all — with few surprises. Acting is broad and serviceable from Sandler and Winona Ryder but rarely rises above SNL-sketch energy. Cinematography is flat and functional, typical of early-2000s studio comedies with no visual ambition. Novelty is low as it recycles both the Capra source material and the Sandler fish-out-of-water template he had already run several times. The ending is predictable and rushed, hitting expected beats without any earned emotional weight. A solidly below-average entry even within its own undemanding genre.