ADAM SANDLER IN THE RIDICULOUS 6

year: 2015 cast: Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Nick Nolte, Harvey Keitel, Taylor Lautner, Jorge Garcia

After a kink in the machinery of Quentin Tarantino's Western THE HATEFUL 8 involving a lawsuit and other such headlined roadblocks last year, the crime genre drama queen finally got a wide national release date for Christmas Day, 2015, now altered to the beginning of January no thanks to the monopolizing power of STAR WARS, and THE RIDICULOUS 6 might very well be the first time a parody of a film is released (a Netflix Original) before the vehicle it's satirizing, although obviously in-name-only, having nothing to do with the HATEFUL plot: yet there are a few Tarantino inside-connections including the words "FILMED IN 4K" (to the right of the opening title) as opposed to "CINEMASCOPE 70MM", the Spaghetti Western music of his previous DJANGO UNCHAINED as well as former stock actors Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel (also regular Happy Madison players) appearing in memorable cameos...

Adam Sandler

In fact, pretty much every scene is memorable in this surprisingly entertaining Western spoof that, more of a spoof of a spoof, if you took away all the zaniness and kept the plot/template firmly in place... how a group of six half-brothers travel around robbing bad guys in order to save their outlaw father (Nick Nolte)... it would make a legitimately serious and genuine venture in the dusty genre. Adam Sandler, as the blade-wielding Tommy aka White Knife, raised by Indians with the sporadic powers of SPIDER-MAN on amphetamines, remains pointed, serious, tough and resilient while the comedy abounds around him, mostly from his eclectic brothers including mule-loving sidekick Rob Schneider, piano-playing Terry Crews, whiskey-drinking Luke Wilson, and two shockingly talented characterizations from the usually limited sex symbol Taylor Lautner as a narrating mega-dunce, and LOST one-note sarcastic big guy Jorge Garcia as a gigantic mountain man spouting nonsense way beyond the "authentic frontier gibberish" Jack Starrett provided (and David Huddleston pointed out) in BLAZING SADDLES.

The journey never lets up as the gang travels from one location to the next... from a bank to a train to a saloon to a big time poker game... and there's always an obstacle complicated enough for the characters and audience to take each heist seriously, building worthy suspense despite an expected punchline around every corner, where some jokes aren't as funny as others... But the fact 6 isn't as RIDICULOUS as most of the horrible Sandler outings of the past decade is a real treat: from beginning to end.

GRADE: A