Adam Sandler plays a 47th Street jeweler whose life is out of control. He's shacked up with his girlfriend, Julia Fox. His wife, naturally, wants a divorce. He owes huge sums of money to his bookie, Eric Bogosian, who sends his legbreakers around to encourage him to a more prudent program of debt repayments. He thinks things are turning around when a rock arrives. It contains hundreds of carats of 'black opals', valued at up to $3000 a carat at auction.

Having spent the first half century of my life in the Diamond District - and twenty years before then - I was impressed by the setting; clearly, the ground floor of 35 West 47th Street has not been cleaned since they took out the diner in the late 1980s. Sandler's character is a schnorer and a momzer, and I am uncertain as to his viability in the everyone-knows-everyone society of the jewelry industry; it was changing to something far less collegial by the late 1990s. Even before then, we had problem children. One tenant was a particular problem, but we didn't throw him out because he was the best gold smith on the street.

Even so, it's not a story of much interest to me. Sandler's character is marked for destruction from the start. Once his current lease was up, he would have been gone. The only question is whether this core of opals can delay his end, and by how long. Nor did I really care.

There's been talk about how brilliant Sandler is in a serious role. Every time a comic actor gives a performance that is serious, people are astonished. I am not. An actor is an actor, and a good comic actor needs to be a good actor with something extra. Sandler has shown himself more than competent in serious roles, like in ANGER MANAGEMENT. It's his charms as a comic actor that have eluded me.