Sandler works twice as hard for half the laughs

In Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” Adam Sandler played a middle-age comedian whose career was built on a series of popular but absurdly lowbrow movies.

The movies are trotted out in faux trailers: “Redux,” in which he plays a 6-month-old baby; “My Best Friend Is a Robot,” with Owen Wilson as the robot; and, most memorably, “Mer-man,” where Sandler plays a masculine mermaid.

If you slid “Jack and Jill” into that lineup, no one would even blink. The film, in which Sandler plays both sides of male-female identical twins, feels like a joke trailer stretched into a feature film.

It’s a gleefully stupid movie much more in line with Sandler’s earlier comedies than his later, more adventurous films. The director is Sandler’s longtime filmmaking partner Dennis Dugan, who directed one of those early Sandler movies (“Happy Gilmore”) as well as more recent failures such as last year’s “Grown Ups” and the much more interesting and funny “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”

In “Jack and Jill,” Sandler plays Jack Sadelstein, a TV commercial producer, married to Erin (Katie Holmes) with two children (Rohan Chand, Elodie Tougne). Thanksgiving brings an unwelcome visit from his twin sister Jill (Sandler).

Jill is less a real character than a walking punch line. She has a thick Bronx accent, a masculine physique and is completely out of touch.

Jack is aggressively mean to his sister, whose visit, much to his chagrin, keeps being extended. Jill proves useful, though, because she’s surprisingly fetching to a handful of men, most notably Al Pacino. That’s convenient for Jack, whose trying to get Pacino to act in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad.

Pacino, who plays himself in a surprisingly large part, is, one fears, going the Robert De Niro route here, using his esteemed reputation to parody himself. With ga-ga eyes, he chases relentlessly after Jill, who is largely unimpressed.

For fans of Sandler’s sillier movies, “Jack and Jill” will likely provide something satisfyingly adolescent and cartoonish. There are all the kinds of things you’d expect: fart jokes, poor filmmaking (a scene at a Lakers game, obviously shot on a green screen, is unusually shoddy) and cameos from the usual crowd (David Spade, Tim Meadows, Norm MacDonald) and a few less predictable ones (Johnny Depp, John McEnroe, Regis Philbin, Shaquille O’Neal).

But comedy has moved on from the mid-1990s, and it’s time Sandler did, too. “Jack and Jill” even gives fart jokes a bad name.