Monday 14 December 2015

Film Review: The Ridiculous Six


Yeehaw! Saddle up for the nadir of Adam Sandler's career with The Ridiculous Six, his first movie to stream exclusively via Netflix. Lewd, crude and destined to put you in a bad mood, you're better off doing literally anything else with your precious spare time.

Not content with stinking up our cinema screens, Adam Sandler has made the transition to streaming for The Ridiculous Six, a Western-style spoof that sees him hit the open road with regular costars David Spade and Rob Schneider. Sandler plays Tommy 'White Knife' Stockburn, a cowboy raised by Native Americans when, one day, his biological father, Frank (Nick Nolte) is kidnapped by a ruthless bandit (Danny Trejo). So Stockburn sets out on a journey to rescue his father along with his five odd step brothers who're played by Terry Crews, Taylor Lautner, Jorge Garcia, Luke Wilson and Rob Schneider.

I'm not going to beat around the bush here - I couldn't actually finish this film. I didn't bother to check to see how long it had left to go, but IMDB tells me that the movie goes for roughly two hours. Safe to say, I made the right decision.

You see, every single character in this film is either incredibly irritating or ridiculously racist - there isn't a single performance that we can latch onto as being genuinely endearing or entertaining. They just spew a slew of word vomit that resembles dialogue before retreating into infantile slapstick humour torn from the mind of a toddler; for example, Schneider plays a cartoonish Mexican bandito who owns a diarrhea-spewing donkey. It's almost like the script was given a quick once over by the pen of Donald Trump; all of the Native American people are given appropriately offensive names like 'Smoking Fox' and 'Beaver Breath' whilst genuinely talented comic actors (like Terry Crews, as we've seen on Brooklyn Nine-Nine) are utterly wasted on a childish script that is like Sandler's worst movie multiplied by 100.

The film also includes a raft of 'exciting' cameos that I'll spoil here so you're not driven by curiosity into watching this monstrosity; Danny Trejo plays the villainous Mexican (naturally), Vanilla Ice plays Mark Twain (yup, really), Dan Patrick plays Abraham Lincoln (because why not?), Blake Shelton plays Wyatt Earp (really scraping the barrel here aren't they?) and, finally, John Turturro plays Abner Doubleday (which, to be fair, is actually more convincing than his performance as an Egyptian pharaoh in Exodus: Gods and Kings). If that array of cameos doesn't excite you, then get out of my face!

Y'know who the real loser is in all this though? Netflix. As a brand, I see Netflix's catalogue of original work as quality, high value properties that cater to an audience looking for something better than the mainstream, reality-driven crap churned out by network TV - it's the main reason that streaming has taken off in such a big way here in Australia.

The Ridiculous 6 simply doesn't belong alongside brilliant shows like House of Cards, Jessica Jones, Orange is the New Black or Master of None. It doesn't mesh with their brand, and I simply don't understand the thinking behind hiring Sandler for a quartet of exclusive films. It's not like the guy has a great track record of late?

The film is essentially targeted at people who flop down on the sofa, flick on Netflix and scroll through without knowing what to watch - "Look", it screams. "Adam Sandler! Y'know, that guy from the endless reruns of Billy Madison you see on TV!"

The only great thing about The Ridiculous Six is that, thanks to it being on Netflix and not in the theatre, you can pause it, vomit into a bucket and continue on without having to disturb the people munching popcorn in the row behind you. You're free to get up, take a shower and return when you've washed the putrid stink off your skin. Heck, you're free to close your browser and never finish the film, just as I decided to do, without feeling like you've wasted money on a cinema ticket.

The Verdict: 2/10


The Ridiculous Six is so offensively bad that it makes A Million Ways To Die In The West look like A Fistful of fucking Dollars.

The Ridiculous Six is currently streaming on Netflix

4 comments:

  1. Wow! I was going to try and catch this at the weekend but I may give it a miss now! Or maybe I won't, I kinda wanna see the disaster for myself...the same way I'm drawn into the Sharknado films! :)
    - Jen

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  2. I knew this was going to be crap. Yet, I heard it takes a lot of your soul from seeing this. Plus, what made you not go for the 0?

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    1. Eh, there's always at least one element that should score - in this case it would've been the direction. Plus I didn't waste any money watching it, so that's a +1 right there ;)

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