Director Frank Coraci, best known for his work with Sandler, doesn’t lift a finger to nudge the actor out of his dopey stupor, instead going along with it and accepting the project’s innate ghastliness. It’s entirely possible that The Ridiculous 6 could contain the worst performance of Sandler’s career, and the Netflix execs who trusted him should be fuming right now about just how much of a joke the comedian seems to consider his new contract.
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He just shows up, mumbles a few lines under his breath then retreats off-screen, presumably to a comfy chair and a cooler full of brewskis (that might be a tad unfair but, on the other hand, it’s hard not to notice that comedies like Blended and Just Go With It have essentially just paid for Sandler’s vacations, so maybe it’s not). Though the material here is admittedly far from fascinating, that Sandler’s still in perpetual hangdog mode, disengaged from everything going on around him, just speaks to how little the comedian cares about bringing actual comedy to the films he inhabits anymore. Abandoned in the care of an Apache tribe, White Knife is brought up to be an expert in hand-to-hand combat, knife play and, as onlookers put it far too many times during the film, “mystical shit.” Unfortunately, the character’s upbringing also means Sandler feels entitled to play the guy as a particularly weary, brooding sort of bastard, whose dialogue is communicated in everything from huffing, broken English to a twangy drawl (apparently depending on what the actor was feeling on that particular morning). Sandler, who also co-wrote the agonizingly bad script with frequent collaborator Tim Herlihy, sleepwalks through the lead role of White Knife, the son of career thief Frank Stockburn (Nick Nolte). It’s an homage to the Western genre seemingly acted, written and directed by a group of people who have never seen one in their lives. Instead, this Netflix original (wisely buried by the streaming service, which foolishly agreed to make a total of four films with this team) plays more like a collection of lazily offensive (and, more to the point, unfunny) sketches connected by a supremely flimsy, not to mention consummately boring, story arc. The Ridiculous 6 doesn’t have any of that. It certainly doesn’t feel like one, given that actual movies usually possess some semblance of comprehensible plot, visual beauty or competently written dialogue. To call The Ridiculous 6 one of Adam Sandler’s worst movies might actually be giving it more credit than it deserves – that is to say, such a sentiment presumes this two-hours-too-long excrement heap of cringe-inducing dialogue and Razzie-worthy acting is a “movie” at all.