CAST: Michael Rooker, Poorna Jagannathan, Pierce Brosnan, Ellen Barkin, Adam Devine, Nina Dobrev, Julie Hagerty, Richard Kind, Lil Rel Howery, Blake Anderson, Lauren Lapkus, and Laci Mosley
DIRECTOR: Tyler Spindel
Owen (DeVine) is brimming with excitement about his upcoming wedding to Parker (Nina Dobrev). So much so, he’s painstakingly created a diorama to visualize the reception seating arrangement, using his action figure collection. He’s represented by He-Man, Parker is depicted as the Pink Power Ranger, and his parents, embodying Skeletor and Medusa, have been chosen due to their difficult natures and misperceptions about Parker’s yoga instructor job, which they liken to a stripper’s profession.
Parker’s parents, curiously absent from this display, have been residing with a tribal community in the Amazon. However, they’ve just RSVP’d to the wedding a week in advance, signaling Owen’s impending first encounter with his future in-laws. Owen’s idiosyncratic action-figure habit is just a glimpse into his quirky personality. A bank manager by day, he drives an unusually nerdy vehicle, passionately engages in Shrek cosplay, and possesses an almost comical level of fear, shrieking at the smallest of things.
One evening, Owen arrives home to unexpectedly find Parker’s parents, Lilly (Barkin) and Billy (Brosnan), having made themselves comfortable in his house. Their demeanor is poised and subtly menacing, radiating a certain aura of coolness and a hint of danger. They take Owen out for a night of heavy drinking, leaving him stupendously intoxicated. The following morning sees Owen outside the bank, hurling his regret into the shrubbery.
Adding insult to injury, an earlier scene predating the arrival of Parker’s parents had depicted Owen proudly demonstrating the state-of-the-art vault security system to his witty and light-hearted colleagues (Lil Rel Howery and Laci Mosley). This scene ominously foreshadows the next, in which a pair of masked individuals, oddly familiar in demeanor, brazenly march into the bank with weapons brandished.
Intriguingly, these robbers seem to have an uncanny knowledge of how to crack the vault – a piece of information that may have inadvertently slipped from Owen’s loose tongue during his drunken stupor the previous night, after one too many appletinis.
It turns out that these mysterious robbers are the infamous Ghost Bandits, who have been successfully looting banks across a vast region for years. FBI Agent Oldham (Michael Rooker) has sacrificed both his marital bliss and gut health in his relentless pursuit to apprehend them. There’s a cringe-worthy scene where Agent Oldham pulls Owen over and stammers, “License and masturbation, please.” One can only hope that Rooker, a character actor of unmatched caliber, received a hefty paycheck that would fund a well-deserved vacation for such a line.
Owen finds himself in a precarious situation – suspecting his soon-to-be parents-in-law of being the very criminals referred to in the movie’s title while also potentially implicated in the crime. He also risks losing his beloved fiance, who staunchly refuses to believe her parents could be recurrent felons. Given these circumstances, it’s evident that things are bound to spiral into a complex, ridiculous, violent, and absurdly convoluted series of events.
Comedies of this simple-minded nature can often put us in a peculiar frame of mind. Enduring them feels akin to sharing a room with someone who persistently attempts to deliver annoying pranks, then justifying their actions as friendly jesting. The Out-Laws commenced on a similar note but managed to surprise me by surpassing the predictable bounds of its juvenile, senseless premise, and progressing through a sequence of equally silly and foolish scenarios.
The majority of comedies belonging to this category – those that are amiably stupid, mildly edgy, indolently directed, and edited as though with a (searches through kitchen drawer) citrus zester – would typically culminate at the robbery, allowing the suspenseful did-they-or-didn’t-they narrative to unravel over the ensuing hour, leading up to the final revelation. However, this film isn’t satisfied with such predictability. The truth is divulged relatively early, propelling the plot forward, and driving its nerdy protagonist to the most frayed, chaotic limits of his character. This is when the film takes a bizarrely violent turn, with heads exploding and actual cars plowing through a real cemetery, crushing genuine headstones. It’s a showcase of both a substantial budget and questionable taste, along with a commendable avoidance of subpar CGI. And the number of times Poorna has to say Dick. Ah.
