-By Frank Lovece

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Adam Sandler knows better, but I guess he really can't do better. The guy has repeatedly shown he has a real actor's emotional range, as well as sharp comic instincts, and that he's smart enough to have plotted a precise and canny arc in his career. The idea of adding children's films into his repertoire isn't a bad one. And, yes, we've used the word "repertoire" to refer to the works of Adam Sander—one can respect that he's done what he set out to do, even if the biggest part of that was to make deliberately stupid, vulgar, yahoo comedies for undiscerning teenage guys. But enough already. When he starts to make deliberately stupid, vulgar, yahoo comedies for undiscerning kids, he's gone too far.

Often excruciating, Bedtime Stories doesn't know what it is or what it wants to say. In the hands of such fabulists as the long-dormant Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, 1983) or Tim Burton, who told a like story already in Big Fish (2003), this comedy about children's imagination and their sense of how storytelling connects to the larger world might have been magical. But instead of a rabbit out of a hat, we get a lead balloon-animal.

The promos have all given the impression that the bedtime stories hotel handyman Skeeter Bronson (Sandler) tells his niece and nephew (Laura Ann Kesling, Jonathan Morgan Heit) come true in real life. Do they? With a wishy-washiness that should be reserved only for washing machines, Bedtime Stories initially suggests that when we're desperate, our minds seek patterns and meaning in coincidental occurrences. A rain of gumballs? Jackknifed candy truck on the overpass. Sometimes the movie's coincidences become more literal, implying there's really magic, but then it pulls back and says, "Wellll, we're not so sure, let's hedge our bets." A cartoonishly bug-eyed, sort-of/sort-of-not-anthropomorphic guinea pig contributes to this vague in-between feeling. Look, decide what story you're telling, and then tell it. See Big Fish, above.

Director Adam Shankman (Hairspray) shows his limitations here—particularly a poor hand with actors, eliciting what is likely the most thrashing, throw-me-a-lifeline work of the estimable Guy Pearce's career. Playing Skeeter's rival for a mega-hotel's general manager position, he all but sneers "Nyah-hah-hah." The Commonwealth-filled cast, which also includes Brits Richard Griffiths as the hotel magnate and Russell Brand as Skeeter's waiter friend, Aussie Teresa Palmer as the magnate's celebutante daughter and New Zealander Lucy Lawless as a snooty desk clerk, is equally over the map in terms of what level of reality to play. (Brand, at least, nails his role as a well-meaning whack job.) And one of Skeeter's lines provides an apt description of Sandler pal Rob Schneider's usual uncredited bit, this time as an ostensible Native American: "I'm like the stink on your feet. I'll always be around."

Having written themselves into a corner, the writers had little choice but to pull a deus ex machina. They had much more choice about whether to have had such a gratuitously mean-spirited ending for two of the already defeated antagonists. Sadly, there are rare glimpses of wondrous insight into the way a child thinks, like the safe menace of a ray gun whose ray becomes a hand that just slaps you a little. If more than 95 seconds of this 95-minute movie had been like that, we would have really had a story.