Adam Sandler Is All Wrong for Netflix’s 'Spaceman'

Adam Sandler has done enough non-comedic roles by now — and done them quite well — that it should no longer surprise us when he shows up in a dramatic part. But watching him in Johan Renck’s new Netflix movie Spaceman, in which he plays an emotionally constipated Czech astronaut drifting through space and mourning the dissolution of his marriage, one is often tempted to ask, Why? Sandler’s best performances have him walking the knife’s edge of rage and alienation. (This is what he does so well dramatically, but it’s also the key to his comedy.) But his anxious hesitancy is nowhere to be found in Renck’s picture, which requires a stone face of a different kind.