"Click" may look like a comedy and sound like a comedy, but it's actually Adam Sandler's mid life crisis arriving just a wee bit ahead of schedule.

After a first half that's the epitome of Hollywood high-concept -- summer spun sugar in its most agreeable form -- this fantasy about a suburban schmo with a magic remote control tilts into darker and darker territory. By the end, the film's having a full-on panic attack: Imagine ``It's a Wonderful Life" with Happy Gilmore in place of George Bailey and you're almost there. Sandler may still be the most unapologetic vulgarian in the movies, but he's married with a kid now and suddenly he's thinking about the big picture. The result is a fully felt meditation on mortality -- with fart jokes.

If that sounds like an awkward balancing act, it is. ``Click" is sweet at heart, though, and it touches on areas of genuine unease for many men. And the premise is blissfully, farcically pure: What if you had a remote that actually controlled the universe?

Michael Newman (Sandler), a Manhattan architect living in the suburbs, finds out the hard way. Stretched to the breaking point between his duties as a husband to Donna (the ethereally beautiful Kate Beckinsale; did I mention this was a fantasy?), a father to little Ben (Joseph Castanon) and Samantha (Tatum McCann), and a groveling minion to boss Jack Ammer (David Hasselhoff, giving a grinning, ``Saturday Night Live"-level performance), Michael heads to the mall one night to replace his 50 remote controls with one. He's tired of pointing at the TV and opening the garage door.

He ends up in the ``Beyond" section of Bed Bath & Beyond (good joke, better product placement), where he encounters Morty, who looks like an untenured mad professor and is played by the great Christopher Walken with a perm and line readings just this side of Saturn. Morty's some sort of emissary from The Man -- maybe he is The Man -- and he gives Michael the sleek blue remote with a few warnings that go unheard: It programs itself after a while, and it can't be returned.

But who cares? Michael deliriously discovers he can fast-forward the family dog through its nightly poop, mute his wife's neurotic friend (Jennifer Coolidge), and skip foreplay altogether. (Here's the litmus test of whether you want to take kids to ``Click," by the way -- if they know what foreplay is or you don't mind explaining it to them, by all means go.)

The front half has all the gags you've seen in the trailers, and they're broad, crass, and inspired, from Michael's petty revenges against the obnoxious kid next door (Cameron Monaghan) to a sequence where Morty gives the hero a tour of the menu options to his life. There's a commentary track (I won't say who by, but you can probably guess) and a chapter search that scares the wits out of Michael by taking him back to the moment of his conception. (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner play his parents; the thought of those two in flagrante is a little terrifying.)

``Click" is driven by more urgent concerns, though, ones that spring from Michael's despairing cry early on that ``every choice I make, everything I do, I disappoint somebody." He starts chapter-forwarding through parts of his life, leaping past family time to get to the pay off of job promotion, and soon the remote is doing the job on its own. Without giving too much away, I can say that we're in the back half of Michael's personal movie fairly quickly, which requires Sandler to don a fat suit and get gray while watching his children turn into grown-ups played by Jake Hoffman (Dustin's son) and Katie Cassidy (David's daughter; how about that?).

Despite a few vestigial groin kicks, this part of the movie is intensely serious, and you can feel Sandler struggling to make a mature statement while still holding on to his boo-ya fratboy core audience. Not for nothing is the film dedicated to the star's wife and child.

Does it work? You certainly want it to. ``Click" puts its finger -- jams its thumb, really -- on issues that have real emotional currency for men (and women) in middle America: how to allot time to the things that matter when the pie is getting sliced into smaller and smaller increments, how to multitask without losing your mind or your soul, how to be present as a parent. The most unsettling idea in the movie is that Michael might go on ``autopilot" for much of his life, because we've all known those fathers who simply weren't there.

On the other hand: When a comedian gives himself a tear-sodden death scene, you know he's starting to wonder What It All Means. This way danger lies, as anyone who has followed Robin Williams's career knows. ``Click" gets its laughs and then sucker-punches us with sentiment; if it doesn't quite represent the new, improved Adam Sandler, it shows him almost desperately trying to figure out who that might be.