Billy Madison Got a 16 on Metacritic. It's Better Than You Think
Time's critic called Adam Sandler's 1995 back-to-school comedy one of the worst movies ever made. Thirty-one years later, it's the one people still quote.
By the Heckle Desk · · 3 min read
Billy Madison opened on Feb. 10, 1995, and the critics treated it the way an emergency room treats a man who walks in with a fork in his head: with alarm, and a little professional curiosity about how it got there. It sits at 40% on Rotten Tomatoes. On Metacritic, which grades on a curve the way a judge grades on a confession, it scored a 16 out of 100. Richard Schickel of Time called it one of the worst movies ever made, and Schickel had seen a great many movies, so he wasn't guessing.
The premise doesn't help its case. Adam Sandler plays a 27-year-old heir to a hotel fortune who must repeat grades one through 12, two weeks apiece, to prove to his father he can run the company. It's the kind of idea a man has at 2 a.m. and ought to have the decency to forget by breakfast. Sandler and his writing partner, Tim Herlihy, did not forget. They wrote it down, and Universal spent $10 million filming it around Toronto, which is where America goes when it wants to look like America for less.
Here's what the reviews missed: the movie knows exactly how dumb it is, and it's dumb on purpose, with discipline, like a stuntman who falls down stairs for a living and has never once tripped by accident. Each scene is built on one joke and leaves before the joke dies. There's a romance, technically, and Bridgette Wilson plays it with the calm of a woman who has been promised it'll be brief.
Then there's the cast, which reads now like a list of people who got famous for something else later. Bradley Whitford, a few years before The West Wing, plays the villain with genuine menace, and that's the trick of the whole thing: somebody in a stupid comedy has to act as if it's Shakespeare. Darren McGavin, the father from A Christmas Story, plays the father again, this time with money. Chris Farley turns up uncredited as a bus driver, Steve Buscemi turns up uncredited and settles the climax in a way no studio note would allow, and Norm Macdonald makes his feature film debut, which this publication considers a historic event and the rest of the world considers a fellow in a hat.
The best scene belongs to Jim Downey, the longtime Saturday Night Live writer, who plays the judge at the academic decathlon. Billy gives a long, wandering answer, and Downey responds with a verdict so total and so calmly delivered that it has outlived most of the reviews. It is a dumb movie's smartest moment: a man of learning looks at Billy and says what the critics said, only better, and the movie lets him win the argument and keeps going anyway. That's not stupidity. That's self-knowledge, which is rarer than intelligence and a good deal less popular.
The audience ignored the experts with a frankness I find admirable. It opened at No. 1 in North America, made about $26 million worldwide on that $10 million, and has grown a cult following that ranks it among Sandler's best. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is 79%, which is 39 points higher than the critics, a gap usually reserved for church raffles and members of Congress.
Sandler went on to make a great deal of money, much of it from movies far worse than this one, which is the critic's revenge: you get rich, and they get to say they were right about the sequels. Billy Madison isn't a great film. It's a great dumb film, and there are far fewer of those. Any fool can be stupid; it takes a professional to be stupid on schedule, and the professionals are scarcer than the fools, though you'd never know it from a ballot.