In “Meet the Parents” (2000), Ben Stiller hilariously discovered that future father-in-law Robert De Niro was an ex-CIA agent.
This weekend, the in-laws turn out to be nefarious bank robbers in the Netflix original comedy flick “The Out-Laws.”
The film follows bank manager Owen Browning (Adam DeVine), who is about to marry the love of his life, Parker McDermott (Nina Dobrev, “The Vampire Diaries”). There’s just one problem: He believes his new in-laws are secretly bank robbers from the infamous crime group “The Ghost Bandits,” committing their latest heist during the week of their wedding.
You’ll recognize Adam DeVine from “Pitch Perfect” and Comedy Central’s “Workaholics,” but he stretches as a leading man, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “Meet the Parents” worked so well because of Stiller’s increasingly frustrated reaction shots to the mayhem, while DeVine plays it way over the top, like a more Pollyanna-ish version of Jack Black. He makes so many exaggerated faces that he seems more like a caricature than a real person.
Thankfully, his parents are far more nuanced, with Julie Hagerty (“Airplane!”) as Margie, who once had a fling with Dan Marino, and Richard Kind (“Spin City”) as Neil, who insists on driving with their private investigator (Michael Rooker) in the backseat. Owen’s parents are initially skeptical about Parker’s parents’ late RSVP to their own daughter’s wedding, and they have no problem telling them during brunch that it’s weird to drink during the day.
Parker’s ‘out-law’ parents, Billy and Lilly, are amusingly played by Pierce Brosnan (“GoldenEye”) and Ellen Barkin (“Diner”), two screen veterans who seem to be having a ball as bank-robbing in-laws, right down to a self-aware joke about their favorite James Bond. I thought there might be a twist where their daughter was secretly in on the robbery scheme with them, but instead she doesn’t get much screen time.
Rounding out the cast is Poorna Jagannathan (“The Night Of”) as mafiosa Rehan, engaging in shootouts where bullets never hit anyone, and Lil Rel Howery (“Get Out”), who is also underutilized as the best friend debriefing on the phone. He was hilarious as the comic relief when he was reacting to Daniel Kaluuya’s horrific encounters in 2017, but this time the daytime antics are so zany that Howery doesn’t have much to add and the scenes aren’t very funny.
The end result is a mediocre script by Evan Turner, who produced Brendan Fraser’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (2008) and Ben Zazove, who wrote the straight-to-video “Tooth Fairy 2” (2012), starring Larry the Cable Guy. Director Tyler Spindel previously helmed the David Spade vehicles “Father of the Year” (2018) and “The Wrong Missy” (2020), which starred Lauren Lapkus, who returns here as a bonkers bank vault guardian.
It would be hard to recommend dropping money to go watch this at a movie theater, but thankfully you don’t have to — you probably already have a Netflix subscription to watch “Black Mirror” and “Stranger Things.” If you aren’t busy this weekend, throw on “The Out-Laws” to pass the time on a Friday night. You might find a few intermittent laughs, but if you have high expectations to laugh your butt off, you’ll probably come away feeling robbed.
