The Week Of is the latest bad Adam Sandler film in a long line of bad Adam Sandler films. Unfortunately for all of us, the juggernaut contract with Netflix that has already produced gems such as The Disastrous 6 and The Do-Over shows no sign of slowing down. Sandler’s half-arsed, dodgy-uncle humour is here to stay.

This time he plays a hopeless dad trying to organise his daughter’s wedding. With a shoestring budget, mounting family pressure and only a week till the big day, Sandler is really under the cosh. To make things worse, more relatives are arriving by the minute and it's up to him to keep them all sweet. Countless sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, mothers, fathers, grandmas and grandads all pile into the Sandler household for some good-old-fashioned ‘in-law’ humour.

The film’s main focus seems to be on Sandler’s sparring with Chris Rock, the father of the groom; in reality, the film is too messy and sprawling to remember who the main characters are. Sandler and Rock are drowned out by the noise around them and the plot creaks under the sheer weight of 30-odd characters. It is hard to keep track, but then again, it is hard to care.

In fact, it is hard to imagine that anyone involved in this film particularly cared: the film reeks of actors, writers and producers who turned up for the paycheck. Every scene is lumbered through with minimal care or attention, with characters being introduced then forgotten, plot lines picked up then dropped, and the camera lazily trailing whoever is shouting the loudest.

It is not so much the darkness of the humour that's the problem; it's the fact that the grimness appears unintentional

As the plot unfolds – by which I mean, as the film skips through a series of set pieces based upon the vague idea that a wedding is happening soon – the humour takes a darker turn. A blatant attempt to use shock tactics to cover up the blandness. In one particularly disturbing sequence, some lads on a stag do re-enact sex acts with a legless man, dunk him into a bowl of punch and chuck him into a foam pit.

It is not so much the darkness of the humour that's the problem, it’s the fact that the grimness appears unintentional. Sandler and Co. clearly see bleak topics as ripe for comedy, but the darkness isn’t fully worked out and it just leaves a sour aftertaste. It is more like the bad sex jokes of De Niro’s Dirty Grandpa than the genuine shock and awe of Knoxville’s Bad Grandpa.

You find yourself repeatedly asking the question: I am not laughing, but why should I be laughing? The answer, depressingly, tends to be along the lines of ‘its funny because she’s fat’, ‘it’s funny because he’s Asian’, or ‘it’s funny because they’re poor’.

The net result is a threadbare with no heart. When it is not actively nasty, the film is eminently forgettable. What should worry us most of all, however, is that Sandler’s style of humour is clearly still finding an audience. If it didn’t, Netflix would have bailed on his contract long ago. The fact that he remains a viable commercial product is a blight on film-watchers everywhere.