The Do-Over (2016)

Adam Sandler and David Spade fake their own deaths and steal two cadavers' identities, which is the sort of premise that once passed for a pitch in a Hollywood conference room and now passes for a Tuesday on Netflix. Steven Brill directs with the enthusiasm of a man who has already booked the return flight. The Puerto Rico mansion, the Ferrari, the orgy with the neighbors: these are not plot points so much as expense reports. The film's cultural register is similarly casual, which is to say it mostly does not have one.

There is, buried in the third act, a genuine thread of corporate villainy. Trojgaard, the world's largest chemotherapy company, has hired assassins to steal a cancer cure and bury it, because a cure would ruin the quarterly earnings. This is the closest the film comes to a thesis, and it arrives without a lecture attached, which we can credit. Elsewhere the casting of Paula Patton, Luis Guzmán, and Kathryn Hahn supplies a pleasingly varied ensemble that the screenplay then hands nothing to do beyond villain, biker, and widow. A late revelation that the dead men were lovers is deployed as a twist, not a theme. The women are materialistic, murderous, or available, in roughly that rotation.

The result is a buddy comedy that never stops to preach and rarely stops to think. Its progressive content amounts to a pharmaceutical conspiracy and an affair revealed for shock value, both of which the film treats as scenery. We have sat through worse sermons. We have rarely sat through a sermon this indifferent to its own congregation.