That one buys a ticket to an Adam Sandler film with low expectations is a given. That one leaves the execrable “50 First Dates” with a new understanding of just how low American cinema can go in duping, coddling, and hoodwinking its audience is actually something of a surprise and a disappointment. Sandler has always delivered on gross-out jokes and frat-boy depravity. Here he tries for romance and depth and watching him fail is like watching George W. Bush trying to speak in polysyllables. He’s not alone in his crapulence: Drew Barrymore’s love of the Eighties hits a vomitous nadir with the soundtrack’s Caribbean-style covers of Echo & The Bunnymen, Human League, and The Cure.

More terrifying than the story’s buffet of schmaltzy clichés is the thought that if Nietzsche is correct then I will see this film over and over again. (Then again, about halfway through this dank cheese puff I felt as if I had seen it over and over again already.) No moviegoer with a heart coud possibly despise Barrymore, who really is something of a national treasure, but even at her best she’s always just short of cloying. Under the influence of Sandler she crosses over into saccharine territory so offensive that it will burn your retinas and scald your ears.

Special recognition for the worst rain-soaked love scene ever: as Sandler and Barrymore are breaking up, the inevitable rain machine kicks in, drenching Sandler’s woebegone face. Barrymore, standing in a dry garage, agrees to a final goodbye kiss. Instead of waiting for Sandler to step forward and kiss her in the garage, though, she inexplicably steps into the rain to suck face. (Maybe not so inexplicably, of course; Barrymore’s soaked shirt provides a bulging eyeful of her best talents.) I left with a headache and the confidence that if a movie could be any more soul-searingly insipid than this one, the indominatble Adam Sandler will one day hack it up.