The Ridiculous Six

Adam Sandler has always been one of Hollywood’s laziest celebrities. Since his beginnings on Saturday Night Live in the 90s, Sandler’s work has rarely been anything but a collection of stupid accents, silly faces, and scripts seemingly cooked up by 14 year old boys. With a couple of minor exceptions when he ventured into dramatic acting in the early 2000s, Adam Sandler has just played the same low-achieving-but-still-secretly-awesome slacker for over twenty years. Admittedly, this formula has occasionally worked. Early on, Sandler made some dumb movies that were actually kind of funny. Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, and The Wedding Singer in particular were joyfully juvenile. They weren’t great movies, but they managed to get some humor out of their immaturity and vulgarity. Unfortunately for us all, Sandler and his regular crew of writers, co-stars, and directors continue to crank out the same lame stuff a quarter of a century later and needless to say, it’s lost a lot of its appeal.

With laziness being his hallmark, it makes sense that Sandler’s latest movie can’t even be bothered to it to the theater for its initial release. The supposedly comedic western The Ridiculous Six premiered on Netflix this week, and given the effort that went into the writing and acting of this movie, it makes sense for it to be most available to us when we are sitting half asleep on our couch at home covered in a fine layer of Cheeto dust. It is a powerfully superficial, casually racist, and perhaps most importantly really unfunny movie.

In it, Sandler plays a Caucasian man raised by Native Americans who gave him the name White Knife. Of course, he’s a deadly warrior and is engaged to be married to the prettiest woman in his tribe whose name is Smoking Fox. One day, White Knife’s real father, a criminal named Frank Stockburn played by Nick Nolte, shows up and wants to make amends for his past and reconcile with his son. Stockburn’s old gang shows up and kidnaps him because they want their share of the loot they stole together. Sandler’s character, now called Tommy, decides to reenter white society in order to rob banks so he can pay off his father’s captors. At each stop along the way, he encounters another guy who says Frank Stockburn is his father. So they form a gang to rescue the dad that none of them ever knew.

The ridiculous six of the title are the six illegitimate Stockburn boys including the sad Mexican cliché played by Rob Schneider, the mentally deficient cliché played by Taylor Lautner, Luke Wilson as the handsome one, Jorge Garcia as the funny overweight guy, and Terry Crews as the funny African American guy. Even this simple description makes the movie sound better and more sophisticated than it actually is. It’s a collection of racial stereotypes, dumb sex jokes, dumber toilet jokes, and Adam Sandler wandering through it all trying to do some kind of quiet Clint Eastwood impression but ending up sounding like he took a couple of Ambien before each day of filming.

The film half-heartedly tries to satirize race and gender roles but fails. It’s not enough to simply point out that people say and do racist things or marginalize or objectify women. True satire uses exaggeration to make a point about those things. The makers of The Ridiculous Six are just happy to make poop jokes and have the Mexican guy walk around with a burro all day. The film wants to be a 21^st century version of the great Blazing Saddles. But like its star, the movie is simply too lazy for that and so, instead of Blazing Saddles, all we get is another crappy Adam Sandler movie.

The Ridiculous Six lasts for two hours, and that’s two hours too long.