‘The Out-Laws’ Review: Adam Devine and Pierce Brosnan in an Uninspired Netflix Crime Comedy

Like the chicken and the egg, it’s hard to know what came first for the new Adam Sandler-produced Netflix feature, The Out-Laws: Was it the title or the concept?

My gut would lean toward the former, so much does this watchable if forgettable crime comedy feel like an entire movie wrapped around a simple play on words. In case you somehow missed it, imagine for one second that your mysterious in-laws arrived in town on the brink of your wedding and turned out to be “out-laws.” Get it?

As silly as that sounds, the out-laws in question, played by Pierce Brosnan and Ellen Barkin, manage to carry the concept to a few fun places, mostly because their characters — a pair of bank robbers named Billy and Lilly — truly look like they don’t give a shit. Compared to their yoga-teaching daughter, Parker (Nina Dobrev), and her fiancé, Owen (Adam Devine), who’s like a loaf of Wonder Bread in human form, the seniors are veritable iconoclasts — a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde with AARP subscriptions.

Director Tyler Spindel (The Wrong Missy), a regular at Sandler’s Happy Madison shingle, and writers Ben Zazove (Sherlock Gnomes) and Evan Turner get all the comic mileage they can out of the generational divide separating the badass Billy and Lilly from the yawn-inducing Parker and Owen, who lead forgettable lives in humdrum suburbia.

The catch is that Owen manages a bank for a living — a bank that Billy and Lilly, who go by the generic (or is that geriatric?) nickname of the “Ghost Bandits,” wind up robbing so they can pay off the evil kingpin, Rehan (Poorna Jagannathan, using an exaggerated Slavic accent), to whom they owe a sizeable debt. Owen soon figures out that the bandits are, in fact, his future in-laws, and when Parker is taken hostage by Rehan, he teams up with them to pull off an even bigger bank robbery to get her back, transforming from a milquetoast nobody into an unlikely hero.

The plot is entirely predictable and the jokes not always salvageable, especially zingers like, “I thought we defunded the police!” which Owen shouts while fleeing from the cops. Most of the humor is very 90s-brand, between the occasional pop culture references (Owen disguises as Shrek for a robbery) and gratuitous innuendo, whether it involves Owen’s mother (Julie Hagerty) reminiscing about a onetime orgy with Dan Marino (say what?) or some ridiculously over-the-top sex talk between the two fiancés (“I’m gonna twist you like one of your Go-Gurts and slurp you dry.” Umm, no thanks.)

Devine’s antics are so broad that Owen hardly feels like a real person. The same could be said for his in-laws, although the 69-year-old Barkin and 70-year-old Brosnan bring a fair amount of experience and class to their rather unclassy characters, as well as a little gravitas to a movie that never takes itself too seriously. There’s a good story at the heart of The Out-Laws about Parker coming to terms with her family’s long criminal history. But that’s more or less tossed aside in favor of all the nonstop gags, in a film that starts off like Meet the Parents and ends like a goofier The Expendables, some excessive violence included.

Per online sources, the production budget was $47 million, and you can definitely see that money onscreen — whether in the various high-tech bank vaults that get ripped off, a massive John Wick-style shootout that takes place in a vegan wedding cake store or a bonkers car chase across a crowded cemetery, where dozens of tombstones fly apart like broken Lego pieces.

The action sequences prove to be more convincing than the film’s major narrative arc, which is about whether Billy and Lilly will eventually welcome a total wimp like Owen into their clan. Their son-in-law has to constantly prove he’s up to the task — that he’s a man and not just a mensch. Like Owen’s array of bland Old Navy attire, The Out-Laws ultimately aspires to a very normcore ideal of marriage, using lots of guns and gags to save a perfect hetero couple from potential doom while preserving two perfect nuclear families in the process. Perhaps it’s still the 90s after all.