Unveiling the Dark Comedy Gem: A Review of The Out-Laws

Even if “The Out-Laws,” starring Pierce Brosnan and Ellen Barkin as the secret bank robber parents of Adam DeVine’s fiancee, weren’t released a week after the passing of the great Alan Arkin, one of the stars of “The In-Laws,” a film that this new one ineptly attempts to mimic, it would still be skippable. This movie is almost entirely generic and desperate yet being oddly satisfied with itself.

Tyler Spindel, a former second unit director for Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison Productions, directed it. Owen Browning, played by Devine, is a bank manager despite being so clumsy, impulsive, and lacking in judgement that it’s difficult to fathom trusting him to take a bag of trash to the curb.

Everyone in Owen’s family strangely believes that his girlfriend Parker (Nina Dobrev), a yoga instructor, is a stripper. She is affable and conventionally gorgeous, yet just unique enough to avoid becoming boring or monotonous.

She exudes stability and maturity. We’ve never been able to figure out why she would be with a man like Owen, who gets worked up over the smallest things, obsesses over action figures and pop culture knowledge, and can’t help but blurt out anything comes into his thoughts, no matter how offensive or inappropriate it may be.

This sort of dynamic is the movie equivalent of the TV sitcom formula where an irritating, clueless, selfish man-child somehow ends up married to a beautiful saint.

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Parker’s parents, Billy and Lilly, have never met Owen or his parents, Julie Hagerty and Richard Kind. Their pretext is that they are globetrotting anthropologists who have spent years researching the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon. Billy and Lilly meet the in-laws, much to their eternal dismay. Billy and Lilly require a large amount of money quickly, and Owen makes it simple for them to raise it. As a result, Owen divulges enough information about his profession to ensure a robbery and an investigation. The plot effectively extends past the halfway point of the movie but refuses to end, serving up theoretically outrageous but largely monotonous repetitions of events from the first half with more vehicle chases, “twists,” shooting, and yelling.

The cast is equally spectacular and ineffective. In addition to Brosnan, Barkin, Kind, and Hagerty, “The Out-Laws” also stars Poorna Jagannathan as Billy and Lilly’s insane money launderer, Michael Rooker as an alcoholic FBI agent who substitutes a straw boater hat for genuine eccentricity, and Lil Rel Howery as the hero’s shouty, excitable best friend, a character straight out of “Get Out.”

The ‘Ocean’s’ flicks, ‘Heat’, and ‘The Out-Laws’ all relentlessly remind you of better films you could be watching instead. When Owen gets to tour the inside of the most advanced bank vault in town, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony plays briefly.

The kind of hard-edged, sardonic slapstick comedy that this movie aims to evoke have a long history. It spans from “The In-Laws” to “Midnight Run” and “The Freshman” to “Central Intelligence” and “Game Night.” The worst five seconds of any of these, however, are still superior to the highlight of “The Out-Laws.” Consider the most annoying DreamWorks animated comedy that might exist, but with humans acting as the main characters rather than any animals or other creatures.

You won’t have to think too hard because a robber wearing a Shrek mask appears in “The Out-Laws” during one scene. Of course, he makes an effort to mimic the Scottish accent of the part. Of course, he follows up by asking one of his colleagues if he did the accent justice or came off as Irish.