And so does the universe correct itself: in the week of the most anticipated film ever made, a new Adam Sandler release trickles on to Netflix. Depending on temperament, spoof western The Ridiculous 6 will mark either a sea change or merely a plumbing adjustment. It’s the first feature Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions has pumped directly into living rooms, a breakthrough that recalls that scatological Stewart Lee aside about paying to watch E4. Despite production line troubles – several Native American extras quit in protest at the project’s insensitivity – the final cut still features characters named Beaver Breath and Never Wears Bra, played by Caucasians in “brownface” makeup. For Sandler, it’s business as usual.
Though the title suggests a Barron Knights-style takedown of The Magnificent Seven or The Hateful Eight, the jokeless prologue hints that Team Sandler really wanted to ride horses as they did the rubber rings of the Grown Ups series. Matters turn notionally comic only after Sandler’s outlaw Tommy “White Knife” Stockburn assembles a gang to spring kidnapped pop Nick Nolte. A low-rent pub-quiz answer in waiting, these are: Rob Schneider in “orangeface” as a Mexican whose burro has explosive diarrhoea; Taylor Lautner as a gap-toothed yokel; Jorge Garcia as a man-mountain mountain man; Luke Wilson as a gunslinger driven to booze by his part in the Lincoln assassination; and Terry Crews as a pianist compelled to come out as black.
Sandler’s go-to story guy Frank Coraci (The Wedding Singer, Click) at least returns from New Mexico with a widescreen-looking movie. Yet the lax two-hour running time is the only other sign anybody’s stretching themselves in the new medium; the material canters along in that mild, PG-13 groove Sandler has been stuck in for a decade. Its less-than-blazing campfire scene sees Lautner reheating Andy Samberg’s “cool beans” catchphrase from 2007’s Hot Rod; Never Wears Bra (Sandler’s wife Jackie) gets leered at in longshot. Among the cameos, John Turturro’s baseball-improvising pioneer garners chuckles, as does Vanilla Ice’s jive-talking Mark Twain. Yet while avoiding A Million Ways to Die in the West’s smugness, Sandler rejects anything so energetic as Seth MacFarlane’s taboo goosing in favour of cheery inanity.
Peer through this dopey haze long enough, and you can’t fail to notice the cavalier racial attitudes, the endlessly pliable women; you’d have every right to be outraged, were it not now par for the Sandler course. The Ridiculous 6 sees a cannily advised operator giving his fanbase what they want, this time without the hardship of having to leave their La-Z-Boys: a brand has been expanded, with no more effort than is required to open a bag of Cheetos. More troubling is what this collaboration says for Netflix, first positioned as an alternative production-distribution model, now apparently throwing money after the same pointless-to-questionable content as every other studio. In 2015, orangeface surely isn’t about to become the new blackface, is it?
