Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Out-Laws’ on Netflix, The Latest Happy Madison Yukfest (That Doesn’t Feature Adam Sandler)

The Out-Laws (now on Netflix) opens with the logo belonging to Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions, and seeing it and not immediately pressing the BACK button is akin to walking into a grocery store where the refrigeration unit croaked two weeks ago resulting in aisle upon aisle of rotting moldering smelly liquifying food and forging ahead with your shopping anyway. I know, that analogy is a real stretch and also real mean, but I’VE sat through Grandma’s Boy and Jack and Jill and Paul Blart: Mall Cop and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, have YOU? This one is headlined by Adam DeVine, who’s like Jack Black if his primary ingredient was aspartame, and co-starring old pros Ellen Barkin and Pierce Brosnan, who maybe should know better – or maybe have earned the benefit of the doubt at this point in their careers? Let’s find out.

THE OUT-LAWS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Owen (DeVine) is super stoked to be marrying Parker (Nina Dobrev). So stoked, he built a diorama of the reception seating arrangements using all his action figures. He’s He-Man, Parker is the Pink Power Ranger and his parents are Skeletor and Medusa, because they’re pieces of work who think Parker’s job as a yoga instructor means she’s a stripper. As for her parents? They’re not represented here. They’ve been off living with a tribe in the Amazon. But a week before the big day, they’ve RSVP’d. Owen’s FINALLY going to meet his almost-in-laws. Now, Owen’s action-figure thing is just the tip of the goofball iceberg – he’s a bank manager who drives a dorkmobile and is way into Shrek cosplay and also is a gigantic wuss who screams like a baby at any little thing. What a catch! Enjoy the rest of your life with him, Parker!

OK, to be fair, he’s a nice guy with some quirks, and let ye amongst us who doesn’t cast the first stone or whatever. Owen comes home one night to find Parker’s parents Lilly (Barkin) and Billy (Brosnan) have somehow let themselves into the house. They’re intimidating, emanating cool and more than a bit of danger. They take him out and get him stupidass drunk and the next morning Owen’s outside the bank hurling into the bushes. It gets worse, because there was an earlier scene set before the parents arrived in which Owen shows off the super-duper high-tech vault security system to his wisecracking comic-relief co-workers (Lil Rel Howery and Laci Mosley). And that scene set up this scene where two masked bank robbers waltz in with guns drawn, resembling two particular characters we seem to have met before. Hmm. And then they know just how to open the vault, which might’ve been something that blibbered out of Owen’s mouth after two appletinis the night before. Right: Oh shit.

Turns out, these robbers are the notorious Ghost Bandits who’ve been heisting banks from here to all the way over there for years. FBI Agent Oldham (Michael Rooker) has ruined a marriage and his digestive tract trying to catch ’em. There’s a scene in which Agent Oldham pulls over Owen and says “license and masturbation please” and you just hope Rooker, a gem of a character actor, earned a fat down payment on a vacation home for that one. Owen’s stuck, between suspecting his in-laws of being [INSERT TITLE OF MOVIE HERE] and being implicated in the crime and losing his beloved fiance who doesn’t believe her parents are felonious repeat offenders. And since all this is going to get very complicated and stupid and violent and stupidly violently complicated, Owen had better man the f— up for a change.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Think the mediocre middle of the Happy Madison catalog – Zookeeper, Grown-Ups 2, Murder Mystery, Sandy Wexler.

Performance Worth Watching: A sad-sack Rooker mixing Mylanta with cheap whiskey is an amusing scene – he should hang with Ethan Hawke’s whiskey-and-Pepto preacher in First Reformed – but it doesn’t yield as many laughs as it should.  

Memorable Dialogue: During a ludicrously destructive car chase in which the cops are hot on Owen’s tail, he pauses to deliver the following cutting, satirical line: “I thought we defunded the police!”

Sex and Skin: This entire movie goes by without Devine showing his bare ass, thus defying all odds and expectations for a Happy Madison movie. 

Our Take: Smooth-brained comedies like this really put me in a mood. Watching them is like being in a room with someone who’s repeatedly trying to give you wet willies and crotch-punch you and then saying they’re just joking around and doing this stuff because they like you. The Out-Laws started that way, but surprised me by pushing past the usual limitations of a puerile, moronic premise like this and working its way through a series of different puerile, moronic developments. 

Most comedies in this vein – genially dumb, edgy but not really, lazily directed, edited with a (rummages through kitchen drawer) citrus zester – would pretty much stop at the robbery and let the did-they/didn’t-they plot play out over the next hour, concluding with the reveal. However, this movie isn’t content to be so predictable. The reveal occurs early on and the plot keeps moving, pushing its dweeby protagonist to the most ragged and frenzied edges of his character (which is when the movie gets weirdly superviolent, as heads get blown off and real cars barrel through a real cemetery, smashing through real headstones, showing off a budget and some bad taste and an admirable avoidance of crappy CGI). Unlike so many Happy Madison yukfests, it’s as if someone actually tried to write a movie here. KNOCK ME OVER WITH A FEATHER.

Not that the effort actually yields much in the way of laughs, but hey, participation trophies all around. Funny, how not particularly funny gifted comic actors like Howery, Mosley, Rooker, Richard Kind, Julie Hagerty, Poorna Jagannathan and Lauren Lapkus can be when given such perfectly mediocre material. A light chuckle or two ain’t nearly enough from that group. DeVine gives it his all, but is 50/50 on the grating/annoying spectrum; Dobrev is a non-entity; Barkin and Brosnan would be an inspired pair in a movie that gave them something to do outside the bounds of basic duplicity and he’s-not-good-enough-for-OUR-daughter crapola. The script thinks it’s being clever when Barkin quips to Brosnan, “You look like James Bond.” But we’re a long way away from Brosnan-as-Bond, and if you need proof, look no further than this movie.

Our Call: SKIP IT. I fully acknowledge that some audiences will further test the limits of subjectivity of comedy by watching The Out-Laws and laughing more than I did. You do you, people. You do you. But I can’t in good conscience recommend wack-ass crap in any form.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.