Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company has such a reputation for insularity that anytime it releases a movie without a star who appears to be a personal friend of Sandler himself, it feels like a major act of outreach. By these standards, The Out-Laws is one of the company’s stretchiest vehicles, entirely lacking anyone who spent time with the Sandman on Saturday Night Live or in a Grown-Ups movie. (Surely, at least Nick Swardson is somewhere in the background if you squint? But he doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the credits.) At times, the movie appears to be recruiting a whole new farm team for Happy Madison, including a try-anything Lauren Lapkus, who previously starred in the company’s The Wrong Missy for The Out-Laws director Tyler Spindel; 2020s utility player Lil Rel Howery; and leading man Adam DeVine, playing an antic everyman desperate to please his prospective in-laws, only to intuit that they may be notorious bank robbers.
In some of his other comedies, DeVine often seems to be performing with his own built-in amplifier, allowing no one else access to the volume knob. That’s still true in The Out-Laws, but – surprisingly, given Happy Madison’s oft-unseemly blending of too-thick pathos and hostile bullying – he does initially tap into something genuinely sweet about Owen. Owen’s a bank manager who is deeply excited to marry Parker (Nina Dobrev), and not just willing to meet her long-absent parents but delighted at the prospect of entertaining them. Owen’s own parents Neil (Richard Kind) and Margie (Julie Hagerty) are fussy and frustrating, so Owen is blown away by the effortless cool of the mysterious Billy (Pierce Brosnan) and Lily (Ellen Barkin). They’re less impressed by him, but it turns out they not have re-emerged simply to wish their daughter well. After a night of heavy drinking, during which Owen may have divulged various bank security secrets, a pair of masked robbers turn up at his workplace and hold up the joint. Could Parker’s parents actually be the notorious Ghost Bandits?
By this point, less than halfway through the picture, The Out-Laws has surrendered its good nature to a lot of screaming from DeVine. That’s the idea: Watch this normal (if overexcitable) guy sweat and twitch and, yes, scream in the face of enormous pressure and a crime plot that’s more complicated than it initially appears (though it’s still pretty flimsy). The problem is how thinly conceived Billy and Lily are as comic characters, written as if Brosnan and Barkin showing up on set and glowering at DeVine would do most of the job, possibly based on the misconception that Robert De Niro was just playing himself in Meet the Parents, rather than giving a particular performance. Billy and Lily have no identifiable comic attitude or personality related to their criminality or anything else, other than a lot of blunt-force swear words and the general aura of movie-star authority. Instead of actual laugh lines or funny behavior, the movie eagerly serves up a bunch of rooting-interest malarkey, attempting to generate sympathy for its lowlife characters. No one seems to realize how Brosnan in particular could accomplish the same goal by simply playing Billy as a likable rogue, rather than a gruff man’s man; here, spitting out R-rated language like “motherfucker” still counts as a punchline. Spindel and the screenwriters seem more at home with the more grounded foibles of Owen’s parents – or maybe Kind and Hagerty are just particularly adept at cohering a bunch of jokey quirks into recognizable people. (“For me, it’s too much,” Neil clarifies after complimenting Billy’s good looks.) As it turns out, these are the stars who actually get near-automatic laughs just by showing up.
The movie’s lazy conception of career criminals (or what could be cartoonishly funny about them) gives The Out-Laws little room to maneuver when it eventually pivots into a wacky heist picture, so it succumbs to action-comedy chaos: Chase-and-shoot-out mayhem with alt-take half-jokes screamed into ADR microphones after the fact. One chaotically choreographed sequence in particular owes a little to Michael Bay in both its bombast and, especially, its grave defilement.
The grotesquerie crowds out the movie’s fleeting cuteness. It’s supposed to be a sign of Owen’s devotion that he gets swept up into a criminal plot if it means saving his wife-to-be; it feels more like an affirmation of DeVine’s desire to cut loose and mug his way into oblivion, character be damned. The Out-Laws does feel like a change of pace for Happy Madison, insofar as it deviates from the listless, downtrodden energy of SNL vets playing sadsack underdogs. It also drifts away from the affably silly watchability of Sandler’s own recent vehicles. You know who’d be good in either one of those? Richard Kind.
Director: Tyler Spindel
Writer: Evan Turner, Ben Zazove
Starring: Adam DeVine, Nina Dobrev, Pierce Brosnan, Ellen Barkin, Richard Kind, Julie Hagerty, Michael Rooker, Poorna Jagannathan
Release Date: July 7, 2023 (Netflix)
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.