The fact that this seasonal slurry is billed Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights should be warning enough.

Like Les Dennis's Laughter Hour or Jimmy Tarbuck's Millennium of Mirth, the title is no guarantee of side-splitting fun. It's more an assurance of mediocrity.

And so it shall pass. Sandler basically plays a cartoon comic version of an amalgam of his big screen characters.

In other words, he's vulgar, cruel and witless but underneath that forbidding exterior there beats a heart of pure gold.

He's Davey Stone - a self-styled "33-year-old crazy Jewish guy" - who gets his kicks knocking over children's snowmen or skating through carol singers while breaking wind.

Over-indulging in the last chance saloon, Stone is put in the charge of 70-year-old local basketball ref Whitey, who thinks he can rediscover the good old Davey.

Whitey, a whizened old codger, makes a living as an odd-job man, straightening Christmas tree lights and cleaning out Portaloos just to make a buck.

But his major characteristic is his voice (courtesy of Sandler), a high-pitched whine which finds you cursing cinemas for not possessing a seatback volume control.

To say this is thin gruel would be doing impoverished broth-makers across the globe a grave disservice.

However, the likes of product placers Foot Locker and Victoria's Secret do quite nicely out of it.

The tone of this sorry affair clumsily switches from an opening scene of petty mean-mindedness to a gut-churningly gooey reconciliation.

It's OK folks - Davey was like this because his parents died in a car smash when he was just a nipper. There's more pathos in a Hallmark card.

"Maybe it's time you stopped running away from your emotions," Davey is told. Maybe it's time everyone started running away from any cinema showing this.

Tim Evans