By Robert Scucci
| Published
I’ve spent most of my week home sick rewatching movies I loved but haven’t seen since before my brain was fully developed, and The Waterboy just so happened to be streaming on Hulu, so I figured I’d give it a go. Knowing that I was putting my memories of enjoying this movie at risk for the sake of pointless nostalgia, I didn’t have high expectations. That said, I also have zero regrets for watching one of Adam Sandler’s dumbest movies from the time when he was such a hot ticket that most pre-teens would have mainlined high-quality H20 directly into their veins if the guy who brought us Happy Gilmore told us to do so.
Does The Waterboy hold up as a fan-favorite with a 71 percent Popcornmeter score on Rotten Tomatoes, or were the critics right to tear into this sports comedy as passionately as Bobby Boucher rants about Gatorade, justifying its 34 percent critical score?
For me, I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle because The Waterboy is incredibly quotable, but as an adult, those quotes land better when applied to out-of-context situations rather than referring to the movie directly.
A Feel-Good Sports Movie With Not Much Going On
One common pitfall I’ve noticed about Adam Sandler-written movies from the ‘90s is that they’re not feature-length film material in the sense that there’s not enough storytelling to stretch across a 90-minute runtime. However, I can see films like The Waterboy benefitting from a TV special treatment where the story is condensed to a half hour without really missing any of the beats that are in the movie, but without all of the filler.
The Waterboy is essentially a feel-good story about a 31-year-old named Bobby Boucher (Adam Sandler) who lives an extremely sheltered life with his overbearing, overprotective, and comically religious mother, Helen (Kathy Bates). Working as a waterboy for the Cougars at the University of Louisiana, Bobby gets fired by Coach Red Beaulieu (Jerry Reed) for distracting the team during practice. Desperately looking for another team that would benefit from his services, Bobby starts working for the South Central Louisiana State University Mud Dogs, who are in the middle of an epic losing streak.
Tired of being bullied for his stutter and his childlike naivety that’s attributed to his domineering mother, Bobby snaps and defends himself for the first time, resulting in Coach Klein (Henry Winkler) noticing his talent for tackling when he takes out the team’s quarterback, Gee Grenouille (Peter Dante), during a practice drill. Believing that Bobby could potentially become the Mud Dog’s secret weapon that gets them out of their slump, Klein convinces Bobby to become the team’s outside linebacker, and encourages him to think of all of the times he was bullied in the past, referring to his concentrated channeling of rage as “tackling fuel.”
Side Stories
While the above rundown is the heart of The Waterboy, there are a number of side stories shoe-horned into the plot to pad its runtime that have their funny moments, but aren’t really necessary.
Bobby, now playing for a college football team, has to attend college, but his knowledge of the world is extremely limited because his mom explains everything to him as a byproduct of divine intervention or the Devil. While this entire B-story isn’t a necessary sequence, it does feature an angry Adam Sandler attacking his professor who bears a striking resemblance to Colonel Sanders, who inadvertently takes several beatings throughout the film by showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Bobby has a crush on his childhood friend, Vicki Vallencourt (Fairuza Balk), who is a troublemaker with a criminal record, and Helen thinks she’s the Devil.
Coach Klein reveals that he once worked with Coach Red, but had a falling out after his playbook was stolen by the latter, resulting in his inferiority complex and inability to lead his own team to victory.
Most importantly, Rob Schneider plays a recurring character known as Townie found in other Sandler outings like Little Nicky – a character that Adam Sandler himself also reprises in Rob Schneider’s The Animal – who constantly shouts “you can do it!” at inappropriate moments.
Streaming The Waterboy
At the end of the day, The Waterboy suffers from a thin plot that’s bolstered by several side quests that don’t really enhance the film’s storytelling, but offer a healthy amount of laughs to move things along. However, most of the film’s quotable moments come from these very side-quests, which ironically give it some kind of staying power.
When I’m grabbing a bite on the go, and the only choice for bottled water is Aquafina, for example, I find myself humming “this water sucks, it really, really sucks!” in reference to The Waterboy. Every time my kids try something new, like riding their bikes without training wheels, the first thing I want to yell at them is “you can do it!,” and so on. Though I just watched the film for the first time since I was about 10 years old, those lines, and many others have remained a part of my lexicon while accomplishing daily tasks, so I personally can’t deny The Waterboy’s charm despite its shortcomings.
As of this writing, you can stream The Waterboy with a Hulu subscription. While the movie’s basic plot leaves a lot to be desired, it’s still a fun form of nostalgia fodder, even if it’s not nearly as good or thought out as I remembered.
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