After Adam Sandler solidified himself as a huge comedy star with his career-defining run of Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Waterboy, The Wedding Singer and Big Daddy from 1995-99, he had earned the creative juice and the $$$ to start his own production company called Happy Madison. Anybody that's seen a film led by Sandler himself or his best buds David Spade, Rob Schneider and Kevin James over the past 20+ years has seen their title card featuring a golf ball smashing into glass before a man (Sandler's father Stanley) holding a golf club appears and says "Terrific!" a couple dozen times, which gives the company more name recognition than just about any other production house in Hollywood. It's kind of remarkable that Happy Madison has been able to endure for so long because quite frankly, their movies just aren't very well-liked.
Pulling up the Happy Madison filmography provides a cliff notes answer to the regularly asked question of "Why did the quality of Adam Sandler's movies take a nosedive after the 90's ended?". Whether it was through bad instincts, a desire to help out his friends who weren't finding much work elsewhere, not caring as much about the product due to his success or some combination of the three, Sandler was choosing to back projects that were varying degrees of bad nearly every time he took something on. After a string of particularly hurtful bombs in Jack & Jill, That's My Boy and Pixels in the early-to-mid-2010's, Sandler made history in the worst possible way as Happy Madison became the first production company to enter a lucrative agreement with the then-ascending streaming giant Netflix. The Netflix pact has effectively rewarded Happy Madison for their questionable project selction as each and every film of theirs shoots to the top of their most watched movie charts for 7-20 days before they fade into the obscurity purgatory that the service's algorithm banishes every project to after its initial release. Action comedy The Out-Laws from director Tyler Spindel (Father of the Year, The Wrong Missy)-who has seemingly become the go-to director for any of Happy Madison's non-Sandler-led projects-continues the company's proud tradition of just hurling any project onto a screen without any real regard for its quality
The plot outline of The Out-Laws reads like a sitcom setup that just happens to have been turned into an R-rated feature film. Owen Browning (Adam DeVine) is a meek bank manager whose blissfully vanilla life with his wife-to-be Parker (Nina Dobrev) is disrupted when her reclusive parents (Pierce Brosnan, Ellen Barkin)-who Owen has never met before-agree to come to the wedding mere days before it happens and promptly show up on the engaged couple's doorstep. Making this situation even worse, Owen's bank gets robbed 2 days after their arrival and after a conversation with a federal agent (Michael Rooker), it's revealed that Parker's parents are actually a prolific bank robbing duo known as "The Ghost Bandits". Awkward! Owen is now forced to walk on eggshells as he attempts to avoid derail his nuptials by keeping this troublesome revelation to himself. Suffice to say, he fails miserably and what ensues in the days following takes him way out of his comfort zone and may change him as a person forever.
When it comes to execution, The Out-Laws has little on its mind other than getting from start to finish in the safest possible way. Far too much of the attempts at humor come from situations where the badass criminal parents are hurling insults at and toying with their dweeby future son-in-law (both before and after he's forced to come work with them) and there isn't more than a couple of funny zingers that come from it. The action sequences mostly centered around 70-year olds Brosnan and Barkin are filled with frantic, choppy editing to cover up the stunt performers that handled just about everything outside of the stationary gun-shooting for them. And perhaps worst of all, DeVine, Dobrev, Brosnan and Barkin don't appear to be particularly concerned whether the movie is working or not as they give these straight-down-the-middle, clock-punching performances and are easily outshined every single time they share a scene with someone from outside of the top of the call sheet who actually takes pride in pulling their comedic weight.
The Out-Laws is never bad enough to be painful nor good enough to be meaningfully funny or engaging, which leaves it in the dreaded dead zone of instantly forgettable mediocrity. The cast-which also includes Poorna Jagannathan, Julie Hagerty, Richard Kind, Lil Rel Howrey, Blake Anderson and Lauren Lapkus aka the people who are responsible for over 90% of the comedic moments that work here-are better than this type of shit. The stunt team headed up by Chris O'Hara and Jimmy Chhiu are better than this type of shit. Even Sandler and his producing team could be better than this shit despite their lengthy track record to the contrary. The lone constant in the always rapidly evolving world of comedy is an unwavering dedication to the difficult art of trying to make an audience laugh and as long as Happy Madison continues to churn out efforts that are are completely devoid of passion and commitment, they're going to continue to make movies like The Out-Laws that will be forgotten in far less time than they took to conceive and complete.
Grade: C
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