I watched Click tonight. I found it to be a strange movie. It was a mixture of the crass and the profound. The message of the movie was clear: appreciate the time that you have with your family, don’t take your life for granted. Appreciate the many blessings that you have and don’t wish away the bad times or the boring times. Stop going through the motions and really live life.
It’s the story of a man played by Adam Sandler who goes through life wanting to excel at work and working hard to earn a promotion from his jerk of a boss. Wanting to give his kids the things that he never had. Being taunted by the kid next door who brags about the things that he has that Sandler’s kids don’t have. He wants to get to the good times and when given the opportunity to control his life using a universal remote control and the ability to fast foward to the good part, he does it and lives to regret it. When he fast forwards through his life, he doesn’t remember it and he’s on auto pilot living through it.
He decides to fast forward to his promotion and finds that he loses a year of his life and that his relationship with his wife is strained and his kids have grown but what’s worse is that the universal remote control adapts to his usage and fast forwards thorough the parts he has fast forwarded through in the past: promotions, avoiding illness and arguments. He comes to understand the things that he values and he isn’t happy with the life that he chose. His preferences reflect a life consumed by his work and he lost out on sharing his life with his family.
In some ways it’s a bitter sweet comedy because you know people like him who are only interested in getting ahead. Who don’t appreciate their live and are walking through it on auto pilot, not really living. Just existing.
I wish that I could recommend the movie but the crass outweighs the profound which is really too bad because the movie would have been much better if the focus wasn’t on cheap laughs but held up a mirror to the viewer and helped them to examine their life so that it would be worth living.