Adam Sandler's Debut Is Also One Of IMDb's Lowest-Rated Movies

The cultural narrative around Adam Sandler is that he's a guy whose movies have gradually declined in quality over time, albeit with an out-of-character masterpiece like "Uncut Gems" thrown in there every once in a while to keep us on our toes. Adam Sandler is capable of giving us a riveting, high-effort lead performance, but for the most part he's seemed to see his movies more as opportunities to hang out with his friends on quasi-vacations, less as opportunities to make any kind of high effort art.

But before we point to Sandler flicks like "Jack and Jill" or "That's My Boy" as examples of the decline of Sandler's filmography, it's worth remembering that his first movie was terrible too. Although most people think of the 1995 comedy "Billy Madison" as Sandler's first leading role, his actual first lead role was in 1989's "Going Overboard." There, Sandler plays struggling cruise-boat comedian Shecky Moskowitz, who repeatedly embarrasses himself on stage before getting the hang of stand-up comedy. Then a couple of terrorists hijack the cruise, but are handled by Shecky with relative ease. 

The movie has a 1.8 out of 10 on IMDb, which is honestly pretty impressive considering 0/10 isn't an option for voters. For context, "Jack and Jill" got a 3.3. Even the widely despised "Disaster Movie," a 2008 spoof film that was seen as the absolute nadir of the spoof comedy genre, still at least managed a 1.9. How exactly did "Going Overboard" pull off a rating this low?"

The important thing to know is that IMDb has only really existed since 1993, or late 1990 if you want to be technical about it. Either way, the vast majority of the reviews you'll see on the site were written sometime after 1998 (when Amazon bought the site), and so were most of the ratings. In some circumstances, this puts old movies at an advantage; perhaps part of why a classic like "It's a Wonderful Life" has such a high rating, despite getting mixed reviews when it first released, is because by the time IMDb became popular the only people thinking about the movie were those who remembered it fondly. The cycle that most popular movies go through — initial praise, followed by backlash, followed by a backlash to the backlash — was already long over for "Wonderful Life" by the time IMDb was founded. 

The opposite bias can happen with bad old movies, however. Because "Going Overboard" is so little-known and not particularly good, the only people today who'd take the time to rate it are people who truly hated it. There were probably viewers back in 1989 who thought the movie was decent, maybe even enough of them to bring the movie into a nicer 2-4 out of 10 range. Those viewers have probably forgotten all about the movie, however, and likely would never have thought to go back and rate it.

But even accounting for such a ratings bias, it's clear that "Going Overboard" was never the type of movie to nail a high IMDb rating. The reviews it received at the time were harsh but not unfair, and viewers who returned to the movie years later don't seem to think any higher of it. As one critic put it in 2012, "There's simply nothing here to capture and sustain the viewer's interest, with [director] Valerie Breiman's relentlessly incompetent directorial choices exacerbated by Sandler's charmless performance and an overall atmosphere of pointlessness." Ouch.