Hotel Transylvania 2’s animated antics aside, Adam Sandler could use a win at the moment, what with Pixels underperforming and the catastrophic failure of The Cobbler to keep his more serious indie acting cred afloat. The first release from his multi-film Netflix deal, Western farce The Ridiculous 6 is part of his attempt to see if an original serving of his broad comedy stylings will work for the streaming service’s audience, and the first trailer is now online.
Sandler stars as an outlaw named Tommy, AKA White Knife, an orphan raised by Native Americans who discovers that he has five half-brothers (including the likes of Luke Wilson, Terry Crews, Rob Schneider and Taylor Lautner) and decides that they’ll go on a mission to find their wayward, deadbeat dad. Oh, and they’ll keep committing robberies along the way. Naturally, this leads to the authorities (embodied in part by Will Forte) trying to track them down.
We’re in standard Sandler territory here: the gags are big and slapsticky, the goofiness of everything (particularly Lautner) is played to the edge and there will most probably be some attempt to shoehorn emotion in there somewhere. The big question will be whether Sandler, who has proved a reliable audience favourite in the past, will be able to succeed where Seth MacFarlane stumbled with A Million Ways To Die In The West. And will the reported controversy about offended Native American performers walking off the set over what they saw as racist references trouble anyone enough to skip the film?
Sandler's certainly rounded up a good, sprawling cast, with Steve Buscemi, Danny Trejo, Chris Parnell, Jorge Garcia, John Turturro, Harvey Keitel, Steve Zahn and many more saddling up. The madness lands on December 11 on Netflix.