The death with which each of us mourns

The king of silly comedies, Adam Sandler, did the unthinkable in 2006: he got us tearful. Click opens as a comedy of manners centered on overwhelmed architect Michael Newman, who stumbles upon a remote control with mystical properties. It sounds easy enough: fast-forward past painful incidents (arguments with your spouse, traffic, colds) in order to arrive at "happiness." But the punch is a booby trap: it's not a film about avoiding boredom, but one in which our fixation with attainment converts us into bystanders of our own existences.

During the first half, Sandler uses his usual repertoire: exaggerated gestures, jokes about inept bosses and annoying in-laws. But the tone shifts when Michael, in his eagerness to climb the career ladder, uses the remote to skip entire years. The film becomes a metaphor for the autopilot mode many of us live in: we think we’re postponing pain, but in reality, we’re postponing life.

The remote, set up by a "death angel" (Christopher Walken), gets accustomed to his routines. Michael dodges confrontations with his wife (Kate Beckinsale), until one morning the gadget begins fast-forwarding on its own. Here, Sandler departs from comedy. His face, once stretchy and cartoonlike, stiffens in a combination of panic and repentance.

The climax occurs in a rainy parking lot. Michael, at this point a middle-aged, divorced man, chases his adult son (played with unsettling aptness by Jake Hoffman) in order to connect with him that work is nothing. He trips, crawls across puddles, and expires with a whisper: "I love you, son." Orchestral drama? Special effect? No—the sound of rain and a man's cough who learned too late in life that time does not go backwards.

Sandler, an actor associated with the grotesque, shows raw vulnerability here. He doesn’t cry with perfect tears; he gasps, clings to the ground, and his eyes convey the anguish of someone who discovers he was complicit in his own tragedy. It’s a rupture in his filmography: the scene doesn’t seek laughs or pity, but confronts the viewer with their own mortality.

The Click message is clichéd ("Live in the moment"), but raw it is. There is no redeemed hero in this movie: Michael winds up dead, robbed of his family and his health. The remote wasn’t a toy, but a mirror of our habit of treating life as a menu of things dispensable.

The brilliance is in the detail: when Michael rewinds his memories, he discovers that even the moments he wanted to avoid (fights, illnesses) had beauty. A burnt dinner with his kids, a sleepless night with his wife—scenes he skipped are now the only fragments he wants to keep..

Why does this death sting? Because Sandler goes out like a normal antihero. He embodies the man who values meetings over kids' playdates, who defers discussions until "later." His death is not heroic; it is ridiculous. It occurs in a quotidian location, in front of no one, and his final action is groveling forgiveness at the feet of specters of his past.

The movie, directed by Frank Coraci, does not hesitate to punish its hero without apologies. There is no heaven or hell—just the quiet of an abandoned lot. But in this bleak conclusion, there is a grain of hope: the chance that, as one walks out of the theater, one hits the fast-forward switch just a little less.

The legacy of Click Fifteen years on, the film remains a standard against which others can be measured in terms of using comedy as a route towards existential concerns. Labeled as a "not serious" actor, Sandler demonstrated that in a movie concerning a wizard remote control there is room to discuss a fear of aging without ever truly experiencing life. The next time you feel like pressing "fast-forward" on an awkward conversation or aimless afternoon, you think of Michael Newman perishing in the rain. And perhaps, just perhaps, you decide to linger in this flawed, awkward, and imperfectly real moment. Because in the end, as Click teaches us, there is no pause on life.