Jennifer Aniston owes her career to the fallacy that you’re only as good as your last movie. A string of box office duds have done little to halt her seemingly unassailable rise to the top of the Hollywood power elite, and her niche as The Successful But Emotionally Needy Rachel Green Girl Next Door shows – at the advanced age of 42 – little sign of being usurped anytime soon.

Just Go With It – largely interchangeable with many of her films – fails on most levels, though to her credit Aniston isn’t one of them. She plays Katherine, a single mother working as an assistant to Danny, who is a successful but juvenile plastic surgeon you’ll recognise as every character Adam Sandler has ever played: goofy, brain-dead and a menace to small children and dogs. His world is one of a rich playboy, trawling bars for women who are susceptible to one of his make-believe sob stories, which range in their details (“My wife beats me”, “I’m lonely on the road”), but are united by one particular: he’s always married. Women, it would seem, are powerless to resist the forbidden charms of a wedding ring.

The film doesn’t yield its Gollum overtones nearly as quickly as you might hope, but things come to a head when he meets the love of his life, Palmer, a suitably voluptuous Brooklyn Decker. She breaks from the script and falls for the real Danny, only to stumble across the dreaded prop in his trouser pocket (alas, not a euphemism). Rather than tell her the truth and risk ruining a good thing, Danny is forced into an increasingly elaborate and costly charade, in which he casts Katherine and her kids as his estranged family. To cement the lie and provide the scriptwriters with a new backdrop to drain of situational comedy, he takes them all on a trip to Hawaii, where – amongst other trivialities – we get gratuitous long-lense shots of Decker in a luscious waterfall paradise I like to call ‘throwing a bone to the guy on a date’.

Based on a film of a Broadway play of a french production, Just Go With It has a lot of inspired lineage for such a crappy movie. Where to begin? Perhaps Katherine’s children, Michael and Maggie (or Bart and Kiki Dee, as they come to be known). Setting aside the question of how a man so well-versed in lying could come up with such an unlikely pair of names, they are the oddest screen children I’ve ever seen. Michael is harmless enough, if invoking a sullen teenage spirit a decade too soon, but Maggie is a genuinely frightening proposition. Whilst possessing all the first principles of childhood innocence, she has been lifted right out of Carrie: for reasons that are largely immaterial, she adopts a faux-Mary Poppins trill throughout and, considering her resolutely fixed grin and dead eyes, I swear I saw her head rotate all the way round one time.

A bigger but less disturbing problem is Sandler himself. This is a man who really possesses but two gears: repressed, angry loner (Punch Drunk Love, Reign Over Me) and fucking cock (everything else). I’ve seen a good number of his 44 movies, and it would be a fair assessment to say 90% of them are irremeable trash, a fate often precipitated by his oafish, simpleton persona that I’m beginning to fear isn’t actually a persona at all. Movies such as this, with their recycled settings and join-the-dots plotlines, live and die on the chemistry and charm of their leads, and though Aniston does her best – eventually – to spark with the gurning primate, Sandler comes up just as wanting as he does in every movie not directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Come the credits, and it was a miracle that Rob Schneider hadn’t made an appearance to unceremoniously smear his balls all over the camera.

The third act of the movie was written long before the setup, and you’ll see it coming all the way from the concession stand. On a night out with archenemy Devlin Adams (a bewildering cameo from Nicole Kidman), Katherine is challenged to say what she loves most about her pretend husband, only to find that her lies reveal a deeper truth. If it helps to set the mood, imagine her looking forlornly at the empty space next to her in bed while the soaring strings of Chasing Cars fade in, because that’s exactly what happens. With Danny due to marry Palmer the very next day, the suspense is palpable, and the complex mystery of who he’ll KATHERINE marry is one I wouldn’t dare spoil.

If Snuffleupagus, hula dance-offs and sex on the beach are your thing, and you just can’t get enough of Adam Sandler being Adam Sandler, then by all means go ahead and rent Just Go With It: he’s technically committed bigger crimes against cinema, and perhaps you fear he might not make rent this month. For the rest of us, our feelings are best summed up by Katherine herself, who likens faking having fun as “a car door slowly shutting on my soul”. Pithy.