On thing that we know about Christmas movies is that there are a lot of them.  Literally hundreds.  And you have any type of Christmas movie you want; funny Christmas movies, sad Christmas movies, dark Christmas movies, and even violent Christmas movies.  But, the one other thing you’ll note is that the holiday season seems to exclusively belong to Christmas cinematically.  It’s not the only holiday that is celebrated during the peak of the Winter season, and yet if you had only the movies to go by, you would think that Christmas stands alone.  There are a variety of winter season festivals that mark the end of the year, but it’s perhaps the eight night holiday of Hanukkah that usually is celebrated alongside Christmas by the Jewish community that is the only other one known to most people.  Hanukkah, the Hebrew festival of light, shares the tradition of gift giving with the Christmas holiday, and in recent times it has risen up in esteem culturally as being a presence in the otherwise homogenous Christmas season.  It’s not uncommon today to see a menorah alongside a Christmas tree in public holiday displays, and as there are growing interfaith families across the world, the sharing of the season between the two holidays is becoming far more widespread as well.   And it is a great thing that culturally we are viewing the holiday season as a celebration of traditions from all over the world now and not just that of Christmas.  But, in terms of cinema, we still haven’t seen much change in the dominance that Christmas has over the season.  Though there have been some attempts, we haven’t seen a film emerge as the definitive Hanukkah movie that helps to cement it’s place as a classic in the same way so many Christmas films do.  Of course, one filmmaker did try, and it unfortunately turned into a monumental disaster.

One of the reasons that we haven’t seen a true Hanukkah classic emerge out of Hollywood is because so many Jewish filmmakers have used their talents to help shape the Christmas season we all know and love.  If you think about it, we have the Jewish community to thank for some of the best Christmas specials and songs that continue to remain essential parts of the holiday to this day (Rankin & Bass, Irving Berlin, etc.)  So it’s surprising that Jews, who make up a significant part of Hollywood history and continue to remain an important community in the industry today, have never been self reflective and put a spotlight on their own holiday season traditions.  Well, one of the reasons that it’s probably the case is that Hanukkah isn’t as important a holiday on the Jewish calendar as Christmas is to the gentiles.  Passover and Yom Kippur are far more important, so Jews probably never saw the reason to spotlight Hanukkah on the big screen as a big deal.  A lot of modern Jews even celebrate the secular aspects of the Christmas holiday alongside their non-Jewish friends, so it’s probably why many Jewish filmmakers gladly made movies and specials to celebrate the holiday season.  But, as Hanukkah has grown as a part of the season culturally in recent years, there are more filmmakers who have wanted to try to give the spotlight to the holiday.  One of those filmmakers turned out to be comedian Adam Sandler.  Sandler, who grew up in a Jewish household himself, played upon the absence of Hanukkah in the public eye during the holiday season, and worked it into a song in his act.  Dubbed “The Hanukkah Song,” Sandler’s tune made it’s first debut on a segment of Saturday Night Live, with Sandler using the song to spotlight a list of beloved Jewish celebrities.  It’s corny and doesn’t really give you any insight into the holiday itself, but in a way it’s also a fun way of showing pride in being Jewish that I’m sure was a major part in Sandler’s crafting of the song.  Perhaps to his surprise, the song took off and became a hit.  In a season dominated by Christmas, it seemed that Sandler’s joke song may have in fact finally enabled Hanukkah to finally crack into the holiday season songbook.

With a hit song, it seemed only a matter of time before Adam Sandler would capitalize on it’s success by making a movie.  And in the turn of the millennium, it was a good bet that he could get that movie made.  Sandler spent his immediate post-SNL years becoming a huge box office champ with movies like Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996) and Big Daddy (1999) all performing extremely well.  At this point in his career, he could get any film greenlit.  This eventually got him a meeting with Columbia Pictures had Amy Pascal, who was interested in producing a holdiay themed movie based around the popular Hanukkah song.  Sandler had an idea for his Hanukkah themed movie, but it was a major departure from what he had made before.  In perhaps the spirit of holiday specials like those from Rankin/Bass and classics like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Sandler wanted his Hanukkah movie to be animated.  And not just any kind of animated; it was going to have Disney quality traditional animation, but still maintain the irreverent edgy humor that Sandler had featured in his earlier films.  It’s unusual that Pascal approved the project, given that Columbia at the time didn’t have an in-house animation studio like Disney had.  Also, traditional animation was already starting to lose it’s luster in the early 2000’s, where even Disney was struggling to find a hit with the medium at a time when CG animated movies like Shrek (2001) were starting to dominate.  Also, Sandler was uncompromising in having this film reflect his standard of adult humor, meaning that this film was likely not going to be marketed to younger audiences who normally would go to see an animated film.  But, the movie got the greenlight and the problems became very apparent as the movie finally reached theaters in time for the 2002 holiday season.

Titled Eight Crazy Nights, after the popular lyric from the song, the movie is a confused mess that neither works as a wannabe holiday classic, nor even as a vehicle for Adam Sandler’s comedy.  Fundamentally, the film really fails to accomplish what it sets out to do, which is to be a Hanukkah themed movie.  The festival barely is a factor in the story, and in the end it really just becomes another Christmas film, because it’s just unavoidable given the wintertime setting of the film.  The story centers around a character named Whitey who is the standard Adam Sandler protagonist; brash, loud and rude.  With this character, Sandler seems to be going for a Christmas Carol arc of trying to soften a mean-spirited jerk through the warmth of the holiday season, only the film never manages to successfully land that plane.  Davey remains one of the least funny and hatable characters that Sandler has ever played, and it’s due to the mistaken belief on Sandler’s part that the mean-spiritedness of the character is what makes him funny.  Perhaps the arc of his character would feel more genuine if there was effort put into showing his transition from heartless to compassionate over the course of the movie.  But no, we need scenes of him throwing another character down a hill in a port-a-potty because gross out humor was considered in during the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  It should be noted that gross out humor seems even worse in traditional animation.  Poop eating deer is bad enough of an idea in concept, but actually drawing it out makes it even worse.  That’s the level of humor you have to endure through the movie.  And what we get less of is anything heartwarming or endearing, which is kind of what you need to be remembered as a beloved holiday movie.

But Davey is not the worst character that Sandler plays in film.  There’s an elderly man named Whitey that takes Davey under his wing and tries to reform him, and Adam Sandler for whatever reason decided that he wanted this character to have the most grating and obnoxious voice ever.  Whitey is the second most prominent character in the movie, meaning you have to hear his voice through the majority of the film, and after a while it becomes an endurance test.  I don’t know why Sandler thought playing this character was a good idea.  Sure, goofy voices have been a staple of his comedy before, but in this case, the comedy is not translating.  I think it’s because the movie attempt to make the character sympathetic, being the one who takes the brunt of Davey’s abusive behavior, but Sandler undercuts all that sympathy by making the character unnecessarily obnoxious.  The character of Whitey needed to be a lot more grounded in order for the film to work, and that called for a much more subtle performance on Sandler’s part, or just the courtesy of allowing a different actor to play the role.  The thing is, we can still hear Sandler through the performance, making his vocal performance feel disingenuous, as if his own intent is to keep mocking the character even through the moments we are supposed to care for him.  There’s also a third voice that Sandler provides in the film, which is for Whitey’s twin sister Eleanore, but that role isn’t nearly as bad.  For one thing, Eleanore is not in the movie that much, and Sandler makes her sound unique enough that you wouldn’t initially know that it’s him playing the role.  If he was wiser, he would have given the role of Whitey to a different actor, like maybe a veteran professional that would’ve found the humanity in the character, and just left the funny voice part for himself for the role of Eleanore.  But, even with the awful performance he gives as Whitey, it’s still not the worst part of the movie, as freqent Sandler coat-tail rider Rob Schneider sinks to another low by playing an Asian restaurant owner with a typical stereotypical accent.  A typical low bar met with Schneider, but made even worse when you have to see it animated.

The most disappointing thing about the movie, however, is that the animation for it was actually really good.  Seriously, the animation team did an outstanding job making the movie look colorful and fluid.  When Adam Sandler demanded he wanted Disney quality animation for his film, he seems to have gotten his wish.  One thing that the production of this movie benefitted from was that it became a refuge for a time for a lot of out of work animators who came from the recently closed animation departments of Warner Brothers and Fox.  Many people who’ve seen this movie have noticed a lot of striking similarities between the animation of this movie and that of The Iron Giant (1999), and that’s because both movies shared many of the same animators.  And those who came to this film from Fox would have had the experience of working under the direction of animation legend Don Bluth.  The pedigree in this film’s animation team really was quite impressive.  It’s just too bad that Adam Sandler had them animating things like pooping reindeer.  It’s astonishing to think that some of these animators went from working on a masterwork like The Iron Giant to working on one of the worst animated films of all time.  The only good thing about this is that it helped a group of animators stay employed for just a little while longer.  The early 2000’s was not kind to the traditional animation industry as it was transitioning into one primarily geared towards computer animation.  Eight Crazy Nights was definitely not the film to help reverse the trend, and in the end it was another sign that the era of traditional animation was coming to an unremarkable end.  It may not have flopped as hard as Iron Giant or Disney’s Treasure Planet (2002), but it certainly failed to connect with audiences just like them.  But unlike the Giant and Planet, it didn’t gain a cult following over time, and has been rightfully dismissed as a failure that needed to be forgotten.

One of the other big failures of the movie is the fact that it even attempts to be a musical.  There are no less than seven original songs in the movie, each of them about as unremarkable as you’d expect.  Even worse, about half of them feature the character Whitey, so if you thought his voice was grating before, now you get to hear him attempting to sing as well.  But, you know what song is not here at all; the actual song that the movie was based on.  At least, it’s not in the story proper; you have to wait until the end credits to actually hear the song.  But it does make you wonder, why bury it in the credits when it should have been the centerpiece of the actual movie.  Sandler wanted to create a new holiday classic that celebrated the often overlooked holiday, so why didn’t he make the kind of movie that lived up to the spirit of the song.  A lot of his baser instincts as a comic probably got in the way, as he likely favored irreverent, offensive humor over heartwarming material.  The musical score also is fairly lazy from a composition standpoint.  Songs just start to be sung without reason in the story.  It’s like Sandler and company were just adding them in to meet a quota.  And they are generic as possible.  Sandler, as demonstrated with his Hanukkah song, can carry a tune, but here he particularly seems to phone it in, especially as Davey who just seems bored whenever he sings.  The weirdest and most out of place song comes from a scene when Davey breaks into the mall, and he hallucinates all of the different brand mascots of the stores coming to life to teach him a lesson; all of which is another blatant example of Adam Sandler using his movies as advertisement space for product placement.

Clearly, Adam Sandler was not the guy to deliver the definitive Hanukkah movie.  Eight Crazy Nights is a nearly unwatchable mess that doesn’t work in any way; not as an animated movie, not as a musical, and especially not as a holiday classic.  It’s just Adam Sandler doing his normal schtick but with even less effort and through the medium of animation.  Sadly, it wastes some really good work from talented animators, many of whom were at the time struggling to survive in a rapidly changing industry, which this film did nothing to help with.  It wouldn’t be Adam Sandler’s last foray into animation, however, and thankfully he has gotten better with working in the medium.  He found success with the Hotel Transylvania series and later his production company Happy Madison produced the acclaimed Leo (2023) for Netflix.  Sandler continues to perform the Hanukkah song on a regular basis, but the film it spawned has faded from the picture, and it’s probably for the better.  It’s just too bad that no one has picked up the mantle and created a memorable Hanukkah movie on the level of the Christmas classics we watch every single year.  It would be nice if a company like Hallmark maybe tried out doing a Hanukkah themed movie in their style of holiday themed, inspirational films.  With Hanukkah’s profile in the holiday season being elevated to where it is now, it’s beyond time to actually give it a worthy cinematic celebration.  At this point, we already know that Adam Sandler is not the guy to make it happen, but his failure shouldn’t dissuade others from trying either.  A lot of Jews helped to make our holiday traditions a little bit brighter.  It would be worthwhile to show some support for getting a spotlight directed at their own holiday for once, whether it’s in song, on television or on the big screen.  As the song goes, “Put on your yarmulke, here comes Hanukkah.  So much funikkah, to celebrate Hanukkah.”