Africa always has one of two possible fates in Hollywood: either as a ravaged third-world in which to stage scenes of exotic carnage, or an earthy utopia where wealthy foreigners learn to harmonise with nature. Blendedis a tourist brochure promising a fantasy safari through all the most nauseous clichés of that second kind of Africa. An aerial camera swoops across the arches of Sun City, with a primal beat of drums and cheery strike of xylophone, gulping up images of yawning cheetah cubs and unspoilt vistas. A blonde trophy wife chants “Isn’t Africa romantic?” with a vigorous jiggle of, what Woody Allen would call, “her chestal region”. And then we glimpse two rhinoceroses copulating poolside at the resort, and a cocktail waiter turns to the camera with a toothy smile exclaiming, “You won’t see that in New Jersey!” Yes, because amorous rhinos are an everyday sight in smog-plumed Gauteng. Isn’t Africa romantic?
As Blended is another slurry rom-com with all the erotic capital of a lecherous uncle, it’s worth asking why “Africa” needs to enter the picture at all. The answer is disconcerting. Blended is about two single parents – the man-child Jim Friedman (Adam Sandler) and his blind date Lauren (Drew Barrymore). He is a glum-faced widower, and she a divorcée with an absent ex-husband who keeps missing their sons’ baseball games. Both have a menagerie of young children – Jim, for example, has a tom-boyish daughter (Bella Thorne) who is consistently mistaken for a man. If only Lauren could provide some counter-balance of feminine energies and girly trips to the salon to help rescue her from the crisis of androgyny... Lauren, on the other side, has a young boy who needs a daddy to initiate him into manhood. It’s almost as though this film is a paean to compulsory heterosexuality and the nuclear family. All the digressions from the status quo – ambiguous gender identity, divorce, single parenthood – must be reconciled into a gleaming and traditional family unit. And if suburban American life is proving too restless a locale in which to undertake this adventure of holy union, why not go on vacation to romantic Africa, where the nearness to horny endangered species and Nature can only help propel us closer to the sanity of marriage?
So it is through a happy accident that Sandler, Barrymore and their respective offspring end up in “Africa”, or as those geography-savvy among us who don’t consider Africa a country call it, Johannesburg. From here, you can expect the usual trials of raising adolescents – from the menstrual to the masturbatory – to be filtered through dick jokes, metaphoric tampons and other vulgarities familiar to anyone who has seen an Adam Sandler movie. The only glimmer of humour to be found is in the always hilarious Terry Crews, who plays a goofy band leader with bouncing pectorals.
Elsewhere, you can expect a condescending mix of the patriarchal and racist. The African resort is depicted as a bourgeois paradise where actual black people are either incompetent and sleepy safari guides, or nameless singers bursting into impromptu song. And of course, you can’t go to Africa without encountering poverty, so the film devotes two minutes to a languorous stroll through a fake township, where the scriptwriters put Lord of the Rings jokes in the mouths of working-class men who I’m sure have more interesting frames of reference. The Africa of Blended is a placeholder, an excuse. The arrogant moral of the story appears to be: bless Africa for providing a therapeutic backdrop for one lowbrow couple to solve their mid-life crises. Don’t watch this junkyard of shallow stereotypes.