The Out-Laws: Pierce Brosnan grapples with a comedy role not quite dumb enough for Robert De Niro

You wouldn’t class the latest big, dumb Netflix comedy as the most self-aware film ever made. Nobody is likely to confuse it with Six Characters in Search of an Author. But it does allow Adam DeVine, dressed as Shrek while robbing a bank, to say of his own put-on accent: “It’s meant to sound Scottish, but I think it came out Irish.” This is in a film that features Pierce Brosnan, forever wrestling with the diphthongs of his home island, perhaps trying for Armagh and ending up in Aberdeen (or vice versa… or something). If that is the joke then it’s a better one than an earlier crack about the fifth James Bond.

Look, you take what you can get with these things. There seems little chance Netflix will offer us a comedy in the vein of Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges. So make the most of an entertainment that comes in at the altitude of a better Adam Sandler joint. That actor is, indeed, a producer on this hectic romp concerning a white-bread couple who, on the eve of their wedding, discover that one set of in-laws are, ahem, outlaws.

DeVine is a nerdy bank manager. Nina Dobrev is a colourless yoga instructor. His parents are the endlessly confused Richard Kind and Julie Hagerty. Hers are the sleek, often leather-clad Ellen Barkin and Pierce Brosnan. Guess which elder pair rob banks? (Come to think of it, the movie might have been funnier the other way round, but we are now beyond the assistance of script doctors.)

Nothing here is subtle, but properly gifted actors get the chance to exercise their chops on some tolerably amusing scenarios. Kind and Hagerty – their characters apparently unable to distinguish between yoga professionals and pole dancers – are good enough to demand their own grey-pound sitcom.

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DeVine gets away with a barn-door broadness that, nodding to the Jerry Lewis tendency, chimes with a film that works a surprising amount of explicit violence into its hectic slapstick.

Barkin is cool as a Popsicle. And Brosnan, grappling with a comedy role not quite dumb enough for the current Robert De Niro, reminds us that, with a very few exceptions, he is always at his best with tongue firmly wedged in still-handsome cheek.

If nothing else the film deserves some credit for risking “Holocaust museum” as a punchline and maybe, possibly just about getting away with it. Decide for yourself.