The Ridiculous 6 **
Dir: Frank Coraci.
With: Adam Sandler, Terry Crews, Jorge Garcia, Luke Wilson. 119 mins. No cert
And so does the
universe correct itself: in the week of the most anticipated film ever made, a
new Adam Sandler release trickles onto Netflix. Depending on temperament, spoof
Western The Ridiculous 6 will mark
either a seachange or merely a plumbing adjustment – it’s the first feature
Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions has pumped directly into living rooms, a
breakthrough that recalls that scatological Stewart Lee aside about paying towatch E4. Despite production line troubles – several Native American extras
quit in protest at the project’s insensitivity – the final cut still features
characters named Beaver Breath and Never Wears Bra, played by Caucasians in
brownface. For Sandler, it’s business as usual.
Though the title
suggests a Barron Knights-style takedown of The
Magnificent Seven or The Hateful
Eight, the jokeless prologue hints Team Sandler really wanted to ride
horses as they did the rubber rings of the Grown-Ups
series. Matters turn notionally comic only after Sandler’s outlaw Tommy “White
Knife” Stockburn assembles a gang to spring kidnapped pop Nick Nolte. A
low-rent pub quiz answer in waiting, these are: Rob Schneider in orangeface as
a Mexican whose burro has explosive diarrhoea; Taylor Lautner as a gap-toothed
yokel; Jorge Garcia as a man-mountain mountain man; Luke Wilson as a gunslinger
driven to booze by his part in the Lincoln assassination; and Terry Crews as a
pianist compelled to come out as black.
Sandler’s go-to story
guy Frank Coraci (The Wedding Singer,
Click) at least returns from New
Mexico with a widescreen-looking movie. Yet the lax two-hour running time is
the only other sign anybody’s stretching themselves in the new medium; the
material canters along in that mild, PG-13 groove Sandler’s been stuck in for a
decade. Its less-than-blazing campfire scene sees Lautner reheating Andy
Samberg’s “cool beans” catchphrase from 2007’s Hot Rod; Never Wears Bra (Sandler’s wife Jackie) gets leered at in
longshot. Among the cameos, John Turturro’s baseball-improvising pioneer
garners chuckles, as does Vanilla Ice’s jive-talking Mark Twain. Yet while
avoiding A Million Ways to Die in the West’s smugness, Sandler rejects anything so energetic as Seth MacFarlane’s
taboo-goosing in favour of cheery inanity.
Peer through this
dopey haze long enough, and you can’t fail to notice the cavalier racial
attitudes, the endlessly pliable women; you’d have every right to be outraged,
were it not now par for the Sandler course. The
Ridiculous 6 sees a cannily advised operator giving his fanbase what they
want, this time without the hardship of having to leave their La-Z-Boys: a
brand has been expanded, with no more effort than is required to open a bag of
Cheetos. More troubling is what this collaboration says for Netflix, first
positioned as an alternative production-distribution model, now apparently
throwing money after the same pointless-to-questionable content as every other
studio. In 2015, orangeface surely isn’t about to become the new blackface, is
it?
The Ridiculous 6 is now streaming on Netflix.
No comments:
Post a Comment