When Deeds' Uncle Blake, passes away while trekking to the top of Mount Everest, A corporate monger by the name of Anderson, played by Peter Gallagher, leaves Blake headquarters in New York City for the hoboken town of Mandrake Falls, N.H. to find the heir to $40 Billion dollars. The heir is supposedly Longfellow Deeds. When Anderson and his side kick show up at Deeds' hometown they inform him that they must bring him back to New York City to claim the money that is now his.
When Deeds arrives in New York he meets all the attendants that attended to his Uncle's needs in his grand home, and Deeds quickly realizes is so big it echoes. Deeds befriends the homes butler Emilio (John Turturro), a man with a good heart, an ability to vanish quickly, and a severe foot fetish.
Deeds learns that with his $40 billion dollar inheritance he also owns a football and basketball team. Anderson has a plan to sell Deeds his inherited shares to the company so he can sell the company off for his own financial gain, meaning the company will lay off most the employees due to the sale. All is going smoothly for Anderson until Babe Bennet a local television producer moonlights as a school nurse in a ploy to get close to Deeds to obtain reporting information for her show. Deeds naturally falls for the innocent small town school nurse and decides she is the one.
The plot thickens when Deeds sells his shares from the company and moves back to New Hampshire when he finds out that his innocent school nurse is not who she says she is. Broken-hearted he watches the news on television that says Anderson will be selling Blake, Inc., and as a result thousands of people will lose their jobs. The nice guy that Deeds is he goes back to the Big Apple and with the help of Babe saves his Uncle's company from demise.
The film has some laughs, mostly by the butler, but Sandlers laughs are few and far between. Unfortunately, Sandler brings a violence to the character that does not mesh with the down home sweetness that he portrays most of the film. Mr. Deeds is still entertaining, it just could have been more funny than violent.
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