Opening on Christmas Day, “Bedtime Stories,” Adam Sandler’s first work for Walt Disney Pictures, tells in a fairy-tale fashion a story about hopes and dreams that can warm the hearts of both children and adults.

Sandler, portraying the under-achieving character we have come to be used to, plays a handyman working at a posh up hotel in Hollywood, who is asked by his sister to baby-sit her two children.

Sharing the domestic duty with a friend of his sister’s, as the latter goes on a job interview out of state after having lost her job as a school principal, Sandler is incapable of offering his niece and nephew anything else but some bedtime stories he skillfully masters.

With themes ranging from medieval castle tales to outer space journeys, his stories never steer clear of Sandler’s character’s career issues, since the theme of the peasant who would be a prince is never cast out. The hero of these stories is always striving to find a better job and also earn the love of a maiden, to the loss of a rival who much resembles the hotel’s manager, played by Guy Pearce.

At one point, some of the events in his stories begin to come true in his real life, leaving him to wonder what prompted the unusual happening. The handyman comes to have the upperhand over the manager at the hotel and he also wins over the latter’s girlfriend, who is the hotelier’s daughter.

Directed by Adam Shankman with a screenplay written by Matt Lopez and Tim Herlihy, „Bedtime Stories” is bound to instill the audience the warm feeling that dreams and hopes can actually come true, if one really believes in them and refuses to let them go.