About three quarters of the way through “The Out-Laws,” the brainless Netflix comedy thriller, veteran bank robber Billy McDermott, played with suave insouciance by silver fox Pierce Brosnan, comes to a realization.

“Just think of all the terrible decisions we had to make to get to this point,” he tells his partner in crime and life, Lilly McDermott (Ellen Barkin).

Viewers might wonder if everyone in this star-laden cast —Adam Devine, Nina Dobrev, Julie Hagerty, Michael Rooker and Richard Kind among them — were thinking, “Amen, brother.”

Written nonsensically by Evan Turner and Ben Zazove and vacuously directed by Tyler Spindel (“The Wrong Missy”), “The Out-Laws” is a blatant rip-off of one of the great comedies, “The In-Laws” (1979), that starred Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. Regrettable that the former is being released, on Friday, July 7, just days after Arkin’s death at 89.

The premise: Hapless man-child bank manager Owen (Devine, of Comedy Central’s “Workaholics” and the“Pitch Perfect”films) is about to marry yoga instructor Parker (Dobrev, of “The Vampire Diaries”). His parents (Kind, star of “Mad About You” and “Young Sheldon,” and Hagerty of “Airplane” fame) are daffy, but Parker’s parents — supposedly doing charity work in the Amazon — are MIA.

Until they aren’t. When Billy and Lilly suddenly appear, they seem vaguely threatening. The next day, robbers knock off Owen’s bank. Could Parker’s parents be the legendary “Ghost bandits” that have targeted hundreds of banks?

Spoiler alert: They are.

When Billy and Lilly’s former colleague, Russian mob boss Rehan (Poorna Jagannathan of the HBO series“The Night Of”and the Netflix series“Never Have I Ever”), kidnap Parker, blubbering Owen joins his future in-laws to get her back.

Much of the cast seems to be having fun, but it comes at our expense. The dialogue is atrocious. For example, a running gag in which Owen’s parents confuse Parker’s yoga job with stripping, and each character’s default insult is “Shut the f— up!” What’s worse, nearly every scene is over the top; even outrageous comedy needs to have a grounding in reality (see the excellent“Joy Ride”).

Brosnan, theone-time James Bond(有一个可爱的债券引用电影中的)has had some interesting roles in his late career (“The Foreigner,”“False Positive”) and been in some dreadful movies (“Black Adam”). Barkin also has had a career resurgence (“Animal Kingdom,”“Poker Face”). Here, the two actors who rose to fame in the 1980s might have achieved something together: their worst movie.

About the only real wit is shown during a car chase through a cemetery, a novel idea interestingly executed. By then, however, “The Out-Laws” is dead on arrival.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@BRFilmsAllen