Adam Sandler's triumphant career as a Hollywood screen comic... it's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma under a vast pile of cash. He has established a mighty position in the bankability league table with, in Philip Larkin's phrase, no advantages of birth or talent whatsoever. Now he trashes the memory of Mr Deeds Goes to Town, the 1936 Frank Capra movie starring Gary Cooper, with a remake so bad it will make your gums bleed. Orphanage fires are funnier.

Sandler plays Longfellow Deeds, the lovable smalltown guy who inherits his media mogul uncle's $40bn fortune and comes to New York where Winona Ryder is the undercover reporter who falls in love with him. It is terrible to see John Turturro embarrass himself in the appallingly unfunny role of the butler.

Sandler's Everyman act, crudely pitched at the "dumb male" demographic, is wincemakingly charmless, chiefly because of his love of violent macho slapstick: hardly a scene goes by without him punching someone really hard. And all the time, Sandler's strange, porcine face hardly changes expression; it never shows anything approximating human feeling. I can only explain his vast box office success as being like Lassie's - only not as smart.