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The Ridiculous 6 isn’t as awful as it looks, but it’s still a Sandler movie
Adam Sandler’s western comedy The Ridiculous 6 was in development at several major studios before becoming the first film in the comedian’s deal to make straight-to-Netflix features. Though most recent Sandler comedies might have benefited from a platform less intent on disguising glorified vacation videos as big-screen experiences, it almost qualifies as a shame that Ridiculous can only be seen on a smaller scale. While director Frank Coraci is a long-term practitioner of the Happy Madison house style (most productively with The Wedding Singer; less so with the likes of Blended), Ridiculous 6 is one of the most cinematic-looking Sandler comedies ever. Perhaps aided by fellow Happy Madison veteran Dean Semler (the cinematographer who shot The Road Warrior, City Slickers, and Dances With Wolves, in addition to Click), there are a number of scenes and even shots in Ridiculous 6 that are better-lit than large swaths of the Sandler filmography.
In terms of comedy, though, the laughs are outsourced so far away from Sandler that many of them come from an entirely separate group of characters, an eyepatch-wearing gang of outlaws led by Will Forte. Sandler co-wrote the film with longtime collaborator Tim Herlihy, and it’s a little stunning that with a whole Old West playground at their fingertips, they felt it prudent to include a protracted scene where Sandler tries to kill a fly—played out mostly in a wide shot of a campfire at night, dubbed with dialogue. Even the moderately amusing bits, like an interlude with Abner Doubleday (John Turturro), inventing the rules of baseball as he goes along, come at oddly timed intervals, pushing the movie’s running time to the 120-minute mark. That’s before it gets to the aimless set piece sitting Vanilla Ice (as Mark Twain), David Spade (as General Custer), and Jon Lovitz down at the same table. Rather than creating real chemistry between the six, the movie takes a long time to gather them, then keeps throwing new characters in their way.
More read>>>http://www.avclub.com/review/ridiculous-6-isnt-awful-it-looks-its-still-sandler-229685
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