9 out of 10
 

"Waterboy" follows a simple tale of how a lowly "waterboy", sent onto the Football field top provide refreshment, becomes the country`s star player, simply by being utterly lethal whenever he looses his temper.

In the title role, Adam Sandler excels as the slightly retarded backwoodsman boy from Louisiana in a style similar to Jerry Lewis, just better. Yet the film is much more with many other incidental events and bizarre characters with the same sort of humour as "Something About Mary". For instance, there`s the coach who`s marginally insane, his assistant who speaks in an utterly unintelligible gravelly pseudo-French Louisianna accent, his girlfriend who spends her time evading the Police in scenes reminiscent of "The Dukes Of Hazard", an obsessive mother who likes cooking him baby alligators and a University professor who has all the various problems associated with being the exact double of KFC`s Colonel Sanders.

Above all, the film works, because, even to someone like myself from a country that knows and cares nothing for American football, it`s portrayed so simply and effectively that the game and the jokes are not only intelligible, but very, very funny.