At first, Blended seems like just the latest emotionally stunted Happy Madison production, those nearly annual occurrences that increasingly resemble ritualistic tributes to some ancient evil with horrible taste. It opens not merely in a Hooters but in the bathroom stall of a Hooters, scanning along the high-heeled feet as Lauren Reynolds (Drew Barrymore) rants to a friend on the phone about being taken to this establishment by her blind date, Jim Friedman (Adam Sandler), who occupies himself in her absence by drinking her beer to avoid having to ask for another. Lauren returns and tries the buffalo shrimp he ordered for her, only to freak out at its spiciness and resort to guzzling a bowl of French onion soup (complete with a shot of congealed gruyère drooping from her mouth, natch) for succor.

As an introduction not merely to the movie but its star’s entire persona, the opening scene of Blended is about as good an artistic summary in miniature as the first few minutes of Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love. But then, the film starts piling on details of the two, both awkwardly single for the first time since going out with the high-school sweethearts they married, both raising a crop of kids on their own. A series of contrivances sticks the two families together on a joint trip to Africa that places the uninterested parents on an inevitable course to romance, but the film places most of its focus on Lauren and Jim’s respective mid-life crises.

If that gives the impression of a more mature Sandler film, however, don’t get your hopes up. Blended carries on the proud tradition of Sandler’s movies being steeped in callousness, most cruelly borne out in repeated jokes that take advantage of the film’s setting among a stepfamily-themed retreat to mock gold-digging stepmoms who universally face the bitter scorn of children they are closer to in age than their new spouses. As for Jim and Lauren’s own children, so little care has gone into their characters that each set of kids is indistinguishable: all of Jim’s girls are tomboyish and odd, while Lauren’s boys are belligerently defensive and hyperactive. Africa often seems like nothing more than a random backdrop for the constant squabbling, which is better than the alternative, given that all the humor that plays upon the setting consists of such things as watching two rhinos get it on, or the recurring intrusion of Terry Crews as Sun City’s own Sexual Chocolate, providing bad Afrobeat-cum-James Brown Greek chorus commentary on Cro-Magnon bits that do not require elaboration.

The only change-up in the usual Sandler formula is the manner in which the film constantly finds ways to soften his image. Jim is a gorilla of a man, a thick-headed oaf with not an ounce of social grace, but the movie takes great pains to make him sympathetic, from having his wife die of cancer to even finding a way to make his date at Hooters retroactively sweet and endearing. It’s a disingenuous move for a movie that delights in the faults of others, especially Lauren’s overly protective treatment of her kids and her clumsiness.

What is there to say about this movie that can’t be said of anything its star does? Groins are kicked, animals get into fights with humans, Adam Sandler makes sounds like Tim Allen’s macho grunt fed through a sampler and warped beyond recognition. Its best trait is merely that it’s not as racist as it might have been, or rather, that it does not devote as much time to its simpering stereotypes of dancing, smiling Africans as I feared it would.

But that only frees the film up to focus on its horrifying view of marriage and children. Gender roles are rigidly reinforced: how can it be that single dad Jim could have no experience and be so terrified of buying tampons for his daughter? Or that Lauren has to swoop in and save the oldest daughter from tomboyishness with a makeover that instantly turns the 15-year-old into a sex object? Jim and Lauren’s romance develops along these lines, not as a gradual recognition of some attractive qualities in the other person but a desperate epiphany brought about by seeing how good the other would be for their own gender-mismatched kids. This view of marriage is so outdated I cannot even place what decade, or century, it comes from.

Blended, amazingly, is likely the best thing Sandler has made since Funny People, and it is still a regressive, racist, sexist parade of telegraphed set-ups and unfunny, mean punchlines. This is how Adam Sandler reaches middle age: not with reflection but masturbation jokes at the expense of a teenage boy.

Grade: D