Sextuplets (2019)

Sextuplets arrives from the Wayans and Tiddes assembly line with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of being anything else. Marlon Wayans plays Alan, a father-to-be who discovers he is one of six, then plays five of the other five, which is the entire business model. The road trip that follows is a series of escalating inconveniences: a bull, a bail bond, a stolen identity, a kidney removed under mild sedation. It is a comedy of logistics more than ideas.

The cast is predominantly Black, and this is presented as ordinary fact rather than a statement, which is the correct approach and also the only approach this material could sustain. Race goes essentially unremarked, save for a passing beat in which Jaspar is marked at a state facility for his lighter complexion, a colorism note that functions as plot machinery. Linda, Alan's boss, is a woman with partnership on her mind and visible irritation at his paternity leave, but the film plays her as a gag, not an argument. Baby Pete, meanwhile, is a small man assembled from failing organs, and his body is the joke. There is no climate anxiety here, no reckoning with capital, no neurodivergent interiority, no historical revision to perform. The film has no thesis.

Critics were unkind, and the unkindness was earned. This is a lazy, messy, deeply unfunny movie, per the consensus, and the consensus is not wrong. It is also, for the purposes of classification, nearly inert: a broad Netflix road comedy that wants only to fill ninety minutes and offend nobody in particular. Its progressive content is incidental, its sermonizing nonexistent. We file it accordingly.