The romantic comedy “Blended,” starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, which opens today, is grotesquely offensive. The romance is sweet and even effervescent, the comedy is homespun and sentimental, but it’s packaged with such a repellent batch of stereotypes and prejudices that it’s unpalatable even to contemplate. As with other business catastrophes—and, of course, the jury is still out on whether this one will end up being a financial disaster or merely a moral one—the most interesting questions are meta: How in the world could they have done this? And who are “they” and how did they manage, for the duration of this production, to check their common sense at the door?

The making of “Blended” could be a “what went wrong” story for the ages. The framework of the movie is simple and strong, if hackneyed: two suburban single parents, the divorced Lauren Reynolds (Barrymore) and the widowed Jim Friedman (Sandler), meet on a blind date that quickly veers to disaster. Vowing never to meet again, they nonetheless cross paths in their neighborhood—a turn of events that foreshadows the core of the plot, when an odd coincidence thrusts them and their families (his three girls, her two boys) together at a resort. And, of course, it’s the children who convert the adults’ mutual distaste into love.

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