Adam Sandler's Worst Movie Ever, According To Rotten Tomatoes
Loving Adam Sandler means making your peace with the actor's wildly inconsistent output. It's not like The Sandman has ever been a critical darling; even during his rise to superstardom in the '90s, "Happy Gilmore" and "The Wedding Singer" were the only movies of his that you could reasonably call well-reviewed (and that's coming from an ardent "Billy Madison" defender). But the films that he's churned out under his Happy Madison Productions, which was founded in 1999, have been all over the place quality-wise. Even most die-hard Sandlites probably wouldn't go to the mattresses over stinkers like "Jack and Jill" and "Grown Ups 2."
That's only become doubly true since Sandler entered his alliance with Netflix in the 2010s. Sometimes, you end up with little more than "content" for viewers to stream and immediately forget, but you can also get remarkably good stuff like "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)" and "You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah," or even a fascinating curiosity like "Spaceman." Of late, there's even been an upswing in the general quality of his Netflix projects. Films like "Hustle" and "Leo" might not be the cream of the crop, yet they've managed to bridge the gap between Sandler's low art and more ambitious ventures with a sturdy mixture of zany gags and earnest drama.
However, if we're going to talk about The Sandman at his best, then we also need to talk about him at his worst. And it doesn't get any worse than his first Netflix film, "The Ridiculous Six" (so far as Rotten Tomatoes is concerned, that is).
The Ridiculous 6 is ridiculously bad
You know how weirdos fixated with rallying against what they perceive as "woke culture" love to argue that "Blazing Saddles" couldn't be made today (as though movies like "Get Out" and "Sorry to Bother You" aren't just as bold and provocative in their skewering of racism)? Well, if anyone gets it in their mind to directly try and one-up Mel Brooks' famous Western parody, they're going to have to do better than Sandler, director Frank Coraci, and Sandler's co-writer Tim Herlihy did with "The Ridiculous Six."
Much like the movie its title is obviously riffing on, "The Magnificent Seven," Coraci's Western comedy is a "Getting the Gang Together" flick — with the twist that its gunslingers are all long-lost brothers who reunite to find their no-good-varmint father (Nick Nolte, because who else would you hire to play a long-absent, deadbeat dad?). The Sandman himself stars as Tommy aka "White Knife," a white man raised by Native Americans, with Taylor Lautner, Terry Crews, Jorge Garcia, Luke Wilson, and Rob Schneider playing his siblings. In the right hands, that setup could feasibly lend itself to a satire with just as much bite as "Blazing Saddles" had upon its original release. Here, though, all you get is "broad racism and misogyny" (to quote Brian Tallerico's half-star review for Roger Ebert.com), enough to prompt several of the film's Native American actors to walk off the set during production.
Tallerico isn't on an island, either. All 37 reviews currently on Rotty T's for "The Ridiculous Six" are "Rotten," with the average score coming in at 2.4/10 (meaning, critics didn't just dislike it on a pass/fail scale, they hated it however you choose to frame it). Happily, everyone seems to agree that Sandler's Netflix products have only improved since then, which ... isn't saying much on its own. At least we know where the bar is, I guess?