THERE'S something sweet and charming about 50 First Dates . . . unfortunately there's also a fair bit that's crude and jarring.

In what's presumably an attempt to woo a bigger audience, this gentle romantic comedy sports an incongruous sex-starved aquarium helper of uncertain gender and a steroid-abusing body builder who suffers from wet dreams.

Neither do anything to enhance the movie, and nor does the hero's side-kick, a pot-smoking, foul-mouthed misogynist who lives vicariously through his pal's sexual adventures.

So, that's the negatives.

The positives are the fact that Adam Sandler as bed-hopping marine biologist Henry Roth limits his over-acting to just a couple of scenes and that, at the core, it's an intriguing story largely told in an appealing manner.

At the start of the film, Roth's forte is loving and leaving tourists who visit Hawaii, where he works in an aquarium. However, he has a dream to sail to Alaska to study walruses.

That all changes when he falls for Drew Barrymore's Lucy.

She's lost her short-term memory in a car accident, which means she wakes every day as if it were the morning of the fateful incident, remembering nothing of the previous 24-hours.

So Roth sets out to make her fall in love with him over and over again.

Sandler and Barrymore in the lead roles work well together and Blake Clark is sympathetic as Lucy's dad Marlin.

There's also an understated cameo from Dan Aykroyd, as Lucy's doctor, who Sandler is going to morph into if he keeps eating all the pies. Looking a bit chunky there Adam!

How plausible the eventual outcome is, is debatable to say the least the film.

But it's testimony to what is essentially a light-weight film that you actually discuss it afterwards.

And refreshingly, it doesn't resort to the usual Hollywood cliches.

I could have done without the performing walrus though!

JAINE SILBERBERG

Rating: 7 out of 10