LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: It is unquestionably true that the popularity of streaming platform originals has significantly impacted the art of filmmaking. Now, not only do these platforms wield control over how you watch things, but they also control what you watch. In the fight to get that binge attention from all the 'Netflix and Chill' audiences, it appears the quality of film has seriously deteriorated, regardless of how far or close it is to commercial appeal.
Netflix's new comedy movie 'The Out-Laws' suffers from the same problem. While the creators managed to win over a great cast and a somewhat interesting premise, 'The Out-Laws' was doomed from the very start because of its lack of attention to good comedy writing, especially considering this was one that relied on shock value.
Adam DeVine gives it his all
The film follows a goodie-two-shoes bank manager Owen T Browning who is to marry Parker McDermott soon. But chaos ensues as soon as his in-laws get involved and are found to have robbed his own bank. Owen has to make the switch to being a rebel when Parker gets kidnapped and has to learn to do things he would have never thought of in his life before.
Adam DeVine has clearly best got the hang of what the film is about. It does track as DeVine played a role behind the camera as well, alongside writers Evan Turner and Ben Zazove. A naturally funny man, DeVine nails his character right off the bat and keeps the film consistently funny with his antics as the typical good-boy-made-to-go-bad. He does not only have a certain silliness to him but the way he delivers lines makes them instantly funnier than how they are written.
The cast is perhaps the most attractive part of this film as even the trailer could not do much in terms of saving it. It's a star-studded movie with Pierce Brosnan next to Ellen Barkin giving us a delightfully dangerous couple while Nina Dobrev is an equally great combination with DeVine. But their characters don't get a lot of space to move around, leaving all the potential untapped.
Writing flounders
One has to give it to the movie - the premise might not exactly be out-of-the-world interesting but it sounds like a promising good time of mindless fun. And 'The Out-Laws' fits the bill at least to some extent. The comedy-action film has a predictable trajectory and it didn't really need to be nuanced in any sense, considering the genre. However, the several fun characters they had deserved more attention, and the story's pacing simply fails to deliver.
The movie is mostly DeVine's one-man show, even though the rest of the cast, especially Barkin as Lilly McDermott, have attempted to do their best with whatever they were left with. However, their jokes and reactions mostly hinge on every new and weird thing Owen does, which only serves to make the characters seem unfunny.
Another thing that hurts the movie is the excess of shock value - perhaps a recurring malaise that plagues cinema in the age of streaming platforms. In the case of 'The Out-Laws', this manifests in the form of several unnecessary scenes that only come across as a desperate move to force some laughs. From driving through a graveyard to the bakery shooting encounter, these scenes are far from rolling-on-the-floor funny and are frankly a pain to sit through. Given the powers of the 'skip 10 seconds' button from the gods of streaming, it won't be surprising if most viewers kept it handy for a considerable chunk of it.
'The Out-Laws' is available for streaming on Netflix from July 7, 2023.
