Love him or hate him, Adam Sandler is not going to go away.

This is the case with both the actor and the character he plays in his newest comedy, 50 First Dates.

Sandler is Henry Roth, a womanizing marine veterinarian who has turned Hawaii into his own sexual paradise.

Henry wines, dines and beds a different tourist each night and then returns each day to his sea creatures, who adore him as much as the lovelorn tourists.

One day at a diner, Henry meets Lucy (Drew Barrymore), a sweet, quirky art teacher who likes to build structures with her breakfast waffles.

Henry is intrigued and pursues her, only to discover that Lucy suffers from a rare disorder caused by a car accident. She has short-term memory loss.

She remembers everything before her accident, but each morning, she wakes with a clean slate, forgetting the day before.

The joke is that Lucy would be the perfect girl for Henry because he'd get to woo and bed her anew each day with no pressure of a long-term commitment.

The joke really is on Henry because he falls in love with Lucy and has to try to win her heart again each day.

The flick also plays a joke on audiences.

This is no Waterboy, Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy or Little Nicky, in which Sandler plays a bumbling doofus.

It's an even more controlled performance than he delivered opposite Barrymore in The Wedding Singer or in Punch-Drunk Love and Anger Management.

He is the straight man in this sweetly wacky romantic comedy and it's his most charming, focused and unforced performance to date.

You can actually understand why Lucy is attracted to Henry.

Sandler and Barrymore have real chemistry and Barrymore makes Lucy's struggle to accept her disorder genuinely touching.

You don't head out to a Sandler movie expecting to have your heartstrings tugged. You expect the old funny bone and ribs to get the biggest workouts.

Director Peter Segal and writer George Wing don't completely ignore Sandler's core audience.

First Dates has its fair share of gross-out jokes and slapstick nonsense, but these are delivered by Sandler's co-stars, particularly Rob Schneider, Sean Astin, Allen Coven, Lusia Strus and Jaco the walrus.

Schneider is a Hawaiian diver who regularly presents himself as live bait to the sharks he insists are the puppy dogs of the sea.

Each time Schneider is on screen, it's like watching sketch comedy. He's very funny in a crass sort of way.

Astin is hilarious as Lucy's brother, with a lisp and a body-building fetish.

He couldn't have found a better and quicker way to toss the mantle of his role as the hobbit Sam in the Lord of the Rings movies. You just sense Astin is going to become a regular in future Sandler comedies.

Coven plays a patient who can only retain information for 10 seconds and Strus is Henry's sexually ravenous, androgynous assistant.

Jaco and a little penguin at the marine centre seem almost human.

Happily, 50 First Dates does not cop out with some silly ending. It's a real romantic comedy that, this time around, required Sandler to do more tweaking than his writer and director.

(This film is rated PG)

More Movie Reviews