Not the worst of Adam Sandler’s Netflix vehicles, but not any good either, Hubie Halloween stars the perennially underachieving actor as Hubie Dubois, a safety-obsessed mama’s boy living in Salem, Mass., who makes sure everyone follows the rules during the spooky holiday. For this and other reasons—including the fact that Hubie speaks in an unintelligible, droopy mumble, which director Steven Brill emphasizes in close-up in one of the movie’s few good gags—Hubie is a target of bullies young and old. On the Halloween in question, he must overcome their abuse while also dealing with a possible werewolf next door and an escaped patient from a mental-health facility. Because 65 percent of the jokes revolve around the dorky, Swiss Army-style soup thermos Hubie constantly carries around, I’ll give both a thermos half-full and thermos half-empty assessment. What makes this half-empty? Sandler himself, who seems particularly uninspired; a forced romance in which Julie Bowen’s divorced foster mom is, inexplicably, the only person in town who can stand Hubie; the 102-minute running time. Half-full? Steve Buscemi howling at the moon and the two brief clips of Creature from the Black Lagoon. Also starring Ray Liotta, Kevin James, June Squibb, Tim Meadows, Maya Rudolph, Rob Schneider, Michael Chiklis, and Shaquille O’Neal, all of whom laugh more during the end-credits outtakes than I did during the entire movie.
