Hubie Halloween (2020)

Hubie Halloween arrives as a Netflix product about a delicatessen worker in Salem, Massachusetts who rides a bicycle, monitors trick-or-treaters, and endures a town's worth of practical jokes. Adam Sandler performs the role in a voice pitched somewhere between a cartoon duck and a personal grievance. The film assembles the usual Happy Madison repertory and lets them wander through corn mazes and haunted houses for ninety minutes. It is amiable, shapeless, and entirely content to be so.

The cast is diverse in the unremarked manner of a comedy that simply hired its friends. Kenan Thompson, Maya Rudolph, Tim Meadows, China Anne McClain, Kym Whitley and Lavell Crawford all appear, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for their presence. A radio host named DJ Aurora, played by Shaquille O'Neal and voiced by Vivian Nixon, is married to Bunny, played by Betsy Sodaro. The same-sex marriage is stated and then ignored, which is the most graceful thing the screenplay manages. The joke, such as it is, rests on mismatched voices. Nobody delivers a speech about it.

Toward the end, Hubie's mother scolds the townspeople for decades of bullying, and the bullies confess their jealousy. This is the film's lone moment of moral instruction, and it lands with the weight of a greeting card. Julie Bowen's Violet exists to be married at the finish. Salem itself is set dressing, its history unexamined and its economics irrelevant. Sandler has made a pumpkin-spiced trifle, and we are asked to grade it as though it were a meal.