As I predicted, this movie got trashed by the critics. As I also predicted, I personally enjoyed it, but I did not predict that I would enjoy it as much as I did.
It's not much use for me to spend time defending the film's humor. Comedy is such a subjective genre--something either makes you laugh or it doesn't. You can engage in extensive critique in an effort to determine why you did or didn't laugh during a particular film, but that's really not necessary. All that really matters is: did you laugh? In this movie I did. Quite a bit. Not all of its jokes were exceedingly clever, but it frequently managed to set up situations with comedic potential and mined them for all the humor it could. Even most of the jokes that didn't work so well bordered on being stereotypical bad "Dad" jokes. Smirking and shaking your head at their (deliberate?) lameness made for entertainment in itself.
The film does have a few problems. The set-up takes a little too long. I was expecting the main plot to get started sooner, but the film was a bit overindulgent in giving itself too many scenes to set up the characters. Many of the scenes were funny, though, which makes me more inclined to give them a break. If something makes me laugh, I'll give it a lot of leeway. The film's other problem is that some of the child characters are too annoying. The three girls of Sandler's character are fine, but both the boys of Barrymore's character are really annoying, especially the older one, and especially at the beginning of the film. Characters can be written so that they are both annoying and funny, but in this case the characters were only annoying. They got better as the film went on (the younger one in particular), but the older kid never truly clicked. I don't know if it was the actor's fault or the director's (perhaps a bit of both), but while every other character attempted at least a bit of nuance, he always went with the most obvious over the top line readings and reaction shots.
These few problems aside, I really enjoyed the film. It follows a formula, but it doesn't try to pretend otherwise. There are enough funny scenes with just enough heart thrown in to make for a pleasant movie experience. Granted, there's probably not much more here than you'll find on a decent sitcom, but like a decent sitcom, it was a lot of fun. For the average moviegoer, this is probably one to wait until it shows up on cable, but it should be a fun watch once it does.
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