Movie review

Netflix's unfunny The Out-Laws gives the comedy genre a bad name

Despite the fact that dramas are the films most often honored by the Oscars, comedies are much harder to achieve on a high level. A script can be very funny, but if it’s not delivered by the right performers, it won’t work. On the flip side, actors can be funny on their own, but if they’re paired with bad material, the results can be disastrous.

A prime example of good actors with a bad script is the atrocious The Out-Laws, a Netflix movie that has a decent premise but filmmakers who have no idea how to execute it. Owen Browning (Adam Devine) and Parker McDermott (Nina Dobrev) are getting married, and Owen is going to meet Parker’s parents, Lilly and Billy (Ellen Barkin and Pierce Brosnan), for the first time when they come into town for the wedding.

Soon after they meet, though, the bank where Owen works as a manager is robbed, and – due to clues too stupid to get into here – he highly suspects his future in-laws are the bank robbers. The remainder of the film is a hodge-podge of contrived situations involving Owen, Parker, Lilly, Billy, Neil and Margie Browning (Richard Kind and Julie Hagerty), crime boss Rehan (Poorna Jagannathan), and more.

The film, co-produced by Adam Sandler with about a tenth of his films’ usual production level, goes off the rails almost immediately. Director Tyler Spindel and co-writers Evan Turner and Ben Zazove set up the premise poorly, introducing Lilly and Billy almost out of nowhere, and then saddling them with unnecessary scenes that do nothing to enhance the plot. Some situations are slightly amusing, but the filmmakers never aim higher than that low level.

They also choose to make the film R-rated, not for any organic reasons, but in order to get cheap, cynical laughs. They give multiple characters random raunchy lines that are either completely at odds with their previous personalities or apropos of nothing, an approach that seems designed to get shock laughter out of the audience. Instead, the delivery of these lines weighs the film down, only serving to highlight how bad the rest of it is.

Inexplicably, the filmmakers also try to turn the film into an action comedy in the third act, forgetting that they don’t have anywhere near the budget to pull off those type of scenes in a fun and believable way. The CGI they try to employ is laughable (and not in a good way), and the fight choreography lacks any excitement whatsoever.

Devine, best known from the TV show Workaholics and the Pitch Perfect series, is the only reason the film succeeds in any way, shape, or form. Dobrev is completely miscast, as she has zero chemistry with Devine either romantically or comedically. Barkin and Brosnan play intimidating figures well, but they fail to elevate the material in any meaningful way. Lil Rel Howery, who has a small part as a security guard, deserves a better spotlight.

It’s no wonder that that comedy genre can no longer be expected to draw big audiences if movies like The Out-Laws are the ones being offered up. Even by the already-low standards of the constantly-churning Netflix machine, this movie has almost no redeeming value at all.

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The Out-Laws is now streaming on Netflix.

Photo courtesy of Netflix

Pierce Brosnan and Ellen Barkin in The Out-Laws.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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