The Ridiculous 6

Release year: 2015
My Rating: ½ out of 5

Tagline: No tagline? WTF?

Synopsis: When his long-lost outlaw father returns, Tommy “White Knife” Stockburn goes on an adventure-filled journey across the Old West with his five brothers.

You know, I've had to put up with a lot while watching every Adam Sandler movie. Yes, I know it's my choice to be doing all of this; it's not like I have to. But even still it's not like Adam Sandler doesn't want people watching his movies. Or does he?

Yes, it is true. We have finally made it to the absolute worst Adam Sandler movie in my opinion. Worse than Bulletproof, worse than Jack and Jill, and even worse than Going Overboard. The Ridiculous 6 is worse movie than something that barely qualifies as a movie. Okay, if I'm going to say this, I'm going to need to plead my case.

I'm going to start with the main reason I hate this movie so much, it's prejudice. This movie is incredibly racist and ableist, way more so than any other of Sandler's movies. There are many Sandler movies that have a character or aspect that is straight up racist, but it's rarely central to the movie and usually doesn't feel especially hostile. And most of the time the one awful aspect comes down to the moments Rob Schneider is in the movie, and very rarely is he plot relevant.

But here, oh but here. He plays one of the main brothers who is a Mexican man. First off, no, Rob Schneider is not Mexican or Latino or anything. And he plays the most stereotyped depiction of a Mexican man I've ever seen put to screen. With the accent, and the tacos, and the sombrero. This feels like someone wearing one of those ridiculous awful Mexican costumes and just making every played out joke in the book, and, you know what, that is exactly what he's doing. You know, when I was in boarding school back in the day, my roommate would say things like "I'm a quarter Asian so I can be racist towards Asian people" and "I'm not 100% white so I can say the N-word". Is that logic really all that far off from what Rob Schneider thinks about himself when he plays these characters? He uses the justification of a 12 year-old.

Then we have Adam Sandler. Okay, like, in theory, he doesn't play a Native American, he just plays someone raised by them. Okay, wonderful, you haven't stooped to Rob Schneider's level. But even still he is filling the role of what could have been a Native American. Or maybe he could be raised by Native Americans and not do a stereotypical act. Just a thought!

And then there's Taylor Lautner's character who is clearly meant to be inbred. And the jokes keep coming down to him having a mental disability. I just don't like what Taylor Lautner does here. It feels gross for him to be playing a character like this and making jokes about being stupid the whole time. It's like that whole "Simple Jack" joke from Tropic Thunder (which came out 7 years earlier by the way) where it is saying how awful it is for an actor to play a character like this. Except The Ridiculous 6 came out only about 10 years ago. Shame on you, Sharkboy.

I think the main difference here between this and other movies' offensive bits is that this feels actively mean spirited. Like the movie is trying to be edgy because it thinks it's funny and is saying "Yeah, we know this is offensive. That's the point". Okay, well if you're going to take such a massive swing like that it at least needs to be funny. There are plenty of movies that push the envelope, Blazing Saddles which this movie takes a great deal of inspiration from comes to mind, but the thing is, the jokes need to be good. An racist joke when nobody laughs is just plain racism. You can't call something awful a joke to rid yourself of all responsibility. Plus, while there are many aspects of Blazing Saddles that couldn't be made today, the main joke is that all of the characters are racist, not that the movie itself is. But the Ridiculous 6, this is just a plain racist movie.

Isn’t this FUNNY!?!?

And even if it weren't for all that, this would still be one of the worst Adam Sandler movies. Sure there may have been like 2 jokes in the whole movie that got me to nose exhale, but at least Jack and Jill had "Dunkaccino". No Dunkaccino here! Just a 5 minute segment on the creation of Baseball where the same joke is "Isn't it funny that baseball has all these stupid rules". Wow, so original, so funny. I'm having a FREAKING BLAST! And it goes on for 2 HOURS!

I think an interesting part of all of this is that this is Adam Sandler's first Netflix original movie. Now maybe you hear that and it doesn't sound that interesting or important. That is until you know that of the 16 remaining Sandler movies, 13 of them released exclusively on Netflix. That is more than 3/4 of his movies released since 2015, and even with his whole catalogue already, it makes up about 30% of all of his movies.

So we got this whole deal of Netflix and Sandler, and this is what they made first. Like, Netflix will truly allow anything, which is nice for up and coming filmmakers. But these low standards for what people produce is part of why the film and TV industry has gotten so much worse. Because they don't care about quality, all they care is quantity and how quickly you can churn out something. Throw a whole bunch of shit against a wall, something's bound to stick right.

The Ridiculous 6 is that shit.