“50 First Dates” is your typical Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore film. The humor isn’t as gross as your ordinary Sandler film, and it’s not as disgustingly cute as a Barrymore film. It’s the perfect balance of both.

This is what the duo’s previous film “The Wedding Singer” did so well. It kept the dry, tongue-in-cheek humor of most Sandler pictures and added Barrymore’s sweet side. Mind you, not too sweet — the Sandler people don’t want their male audience to feel insecure watching this with a big group of their fraternity brothers.

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“50 First Dates” is a similar tale. Sandler plays Henry Roth, a marine biologist living in Hawaii. Henry spends most of his days taking advantage of tourists, mainly because he is terrified of commitment.

Until, of course, the day he meets Lucy (Barrymore). He spots her in a local restaurant eating breakfast (building little houses out of waffles, actually) and works his charm to be invited to join her. Things go great and, for once in his short life, Henry is looking forward to seeing a girl a second time.

The catch, of course, is that Lucy has short-term memory loss triggered from a horrible cow versus car accident. This means that she wakes up every day forgetting the last. She thinks that each day is the day of her accident, and her father and brother try their best to keep it that way.

To accomplish this feat, her father keeps a stack of newspapers from that day. All of the people at the local diner play along as well, making sure Lucy goes through her day peacefully.

This doesn’t work out too well for Henry, who must spend each and every day convincing Lucy to fall in love with him again. This leads to several humorous situations in which Henry crashes and burns.

Like other Sandler pictures, this one is laced with ambiguously gay characters, silly physical comedy and one ridiculous gross-out gag. Such a gag seems so out of place in a film as sweet and likable as this.

Omitting the brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson picture “Punch Drunk Love,” “50 First Dates” is one of Sandler’s only films that actually has a heart. This allows director Peter Segal (“Tommy Boy”) to play up Sandler and Barrymore’s puppy-dog characteristics to their greatest potential.

Whether such characteristics please or annoy a viewer is completely up to them. Some might be quick to complain about how corny this movie is or about the flaws in the idea that the Lucy’s day can be recreated over and over. Or there are the complaints of the nonsensical theory that two people can fall in love while playing with waffles.

I guess I’m not that cynical yet — part of me believes that such a situation is possible. Wouldn’t it be nice to look across a diner and see your destiny creating an outstanding fortress made of egg and flour? Sure, it might not ever happen, but at least it can in the movies.

But the question still remains as to whether a womanizing pig like Henry can be transformed into a lovable doofus in a matter of seconds. This situation is a little harder to believe.

Those would have to be some pretty magic waffles.