By Robert Scucci
| Published
Happy Madison Productions. The guy from Workaholics. James Bond. What do these things have in common? 2023’s The Out-Laws, starring Adam DeVine, Pierce Brosnan, Ellen Barkin, and Nina Dobrev. As much as I wanted to like this movie, the whole does not equal the sum of its parts. It’s one of those instances where you have reliably funny people attempting to serve a screenplay that’s too little, and decades too late. The best way to describe The Out-Laws is a cross between Meet the Parents and any heist film you’ve ever seen from the early aughts.
There’s some great chemistry between the characters, but chemistry alone cannot save a movie that doesn’t have much else going for it. The interactions between DeVine and Brosnan are tremendous, and I’d love to see these characters interact more on a meaningful level. Given its miserable 21 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the fact that Netflix doesn’t openly report how much revenue their originals generate, it’s safe to say we won’t be getting a sequel based on those figures alone. That would be preposterous.
A Charismatic Cast With A Boilerplate Heist
The Out-Laws, like Meet the Parents, tells the story of Owen Browning (Adam DeVine), a bank manager who’s about to marry his yoga instructor fiancée, Parker (Nina Dobrev). By this point, Owen and Parker have made peace with the fact that his parents, Neil (Richard Kind) and Margie (Julie Hagerty), are boomer caricatures who are intrusive and outspoken. The running gag is that they think Parker is a pole dancer because she teaches yoga. Real funny stuff there. Let’s make sure they run it into the ground for 95 minutes (spoiler alert).
The conflict kicks in when Parker’s parents, Billy (Pierce Brosnan) and Lily (Ellen Barkin) McDermott, come out of the woodwork to attend the wedding. To the best of Parker’s knowledge, her parents have been traveling the globe doing humanitarian work. The reality is that they’re actually a prolific bank-robbing duo known as the Ghost Bandits. Once they learn Owen is a bank manager, they realize they can pull off the perfect crime, largely because Owen is an idiot.
They carry out the robbery, which sets off a chain reaction involving Eastern European crime boss Rehan Zakaryan (Poorna Jagannathan), a dangerous woman they owe a substantial amount of money to. Owen doesn’t have definitive proof that it was Parker’s parents who robbed his bank, since they wore masks, but he recognizes the scent of Billy’s cologne, described as a combination of sandalwood and danger. Caught between the chaos at work, the McDermotts’ crime spree, and his fiancée, Owen has to figure out how to keep the peace as his personal and professional life fall apart right before the wedding.
Solid Nuggets, But Otherwise Unsubstantial
There are some great zingers in The Out-Laws that are worth sticking around for. My personal favorite is when Billy asks Lily who her favorite James Bond is, and without hesitation she says “Number 5.” Adam DeVine’s interactions with Pierce Brosnan work by design because of their adversarial dynamic, but DeVine’s schtick gets old fast. He does a lot of screaming and panicking, and tries to throw jokes into every single interaction when it’s not that kind of movie. The situational comedy around the heists should be doing the heavy lifting, not constant banter.
Speaking of the heist, that’s the other major problem with The Out-Laws. It’s a stupidly simple setup. I can’t point to a specific movie it copies, but it basically boils down to “we robbed a bank, now we need to rob another one.” There’s no real grand plan. Just find the vault and crack it. There’s also a sequence where Owen, dressed as Shrek, gets his ass handed to him, and it feels completely forced. Like somebody in a boardroom said, “I’m not greenlighting this without the Shrek showdown,” and refused to budge.
It all plays out like other comedies that fail because they try too hard to be funny. DeVine’s other effort with his Workaholics alums, Game Over, Man, runs into the same issue. Dirty Grandpa (2016) falls into that trap too. If everybody is trying to be funny every time they open their mouth, it gets old fast, and this movie is no exception.
It’s a shame that The Out-Laws wasn’t a better movie because the dynamic between DeVine and Brosnan was absolutely worth my time. But it’s not original either. It’s basically Meet the Parents if Gaylord Focker and Jack Byrnes decide to rob a bank. That’s the dynamic you’re getting here.
The Out-Laws is a Netflix Original and is available to stream with an active subscription.
