‘The Out-Laws’ Review: The Actors Steal the Deal

Tyler Spindel’s The Out-Laws is exactly the kind of film that streaming services have promised to showcase for years but have rarely delivered. Written by Ben Zazove and Evan Turner, it’s the sort of breezily pleasurable, mid-budget, and intimately scaled movie that used to be a staple of the video stores that streaming helped to kill.

Tightly wound bank manager Owen (Adam DeVine), on the eve of his nuptials to Parker (Nina Dobrev), finally meets her parents, Billy (Pierce Brosnan) and Lilly (Ellen Barkin), only for his excitement to quickly turn sour when his bank is robbed by bandits whom he strongly suspects are his future in-laws. Before Owen can confirm his suspicions, though, Billy and Lilly get their cover blown by a rival thief (Poorna Jagannathan), who takes Parker hostage to extort her parents, forcing them (and Owen) to commit further robberies to pay her ransom.

That abrupt ramping up of intensity is one that The Out-Laws struggles to modulate, particularly as the skittish, shriek-prone Owen constantly escalates already tense situations with his hair-trigger terror. Occasionally, though, the film’s belligerent absurdity pays dividends, as in a scene where Billy, Lilly, and Owen try to evade police by barreling through a graveyard in an armored truck, with the vehicle demolishing headstones as if they were made of chalk.

At a certain point, this unlikely trio has defaced so many graves that even Billy, heretofore a hard-edged, rough-talking figure, lets slip a moment of agonized Catholic guilt by begging God’s forgiveness. But this is also one of the few scenes that could qualify as action in a film that’s billed as an action comedy, with much of the trim 95-minute runtime devoted to repetitive scenes of the characters talking about their plans more than executing them.

The Out-Laws shines when it spotlights the committed performances of its cast. DeVine has made a specialty out of characters like Owen, people whose cutesy, aggressively G-rated lexicon and Harry Potterish vibe barely mask a roiling terror of the world. DeVine overemphasizes every cringeworthy lilt that Owen puts into singsong cadence, so that Owen comes across even more like a youth pastor than the one the actor actually plays on The Righteous Gemstones.

Owen’s cloying bubbliness finds a hilarious foil in Billy and Lilly, who bristle with such malevolence that one suspects they harbor ulterior motives well before the film reveals their true nature. Brosnan is especially amusing, with his Billy responding to Owen’s overtures of forging a bond by staring holes into his future son-in-law. Not to be outdone are Richard Kind and Julie Hagerty as Owen’s nebbish parents, who crop up from time to time to jabber inanely about Parker’s parents as if their work were more of an embarrassing hobby than a crime.

Watching the actors bounce their energies off of each other proves more entertaining and fresher than anything to do with the plot concerning the robberies. As the film starts to resemble a watered-down Coen brothers farce in its second half, it helps that Brosnan and Barkin do such a good job at capturing Billy and Lilly’s emotional thaw toward Owen, with the latter proving that he’s not such a spineless jellyfish when he tries to save his fiancée. Though willing at every turn to see Owen killed if it means protecting their own child, the robbers have to admit there’s something charming about the fact that he’d be just as quick to volunteer for the task.