Daddy's Home (2015)
Directed by Sean Anders
The story of a mild-mannered radio executive who strives to become the best stepdad ever to his wife's two children, but complications ensue when their freewheeling, freeloading real father arrives, forcing stepdad to compete for the affection of the kids.
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4 films that influenced Daddy's Home
What critics say influenced Daddy's Home
A twist on Ferrell’s much funnier Step Brothers, it’s content to be a pale reminder of the actor’s more inspired work.
It’s second-tier Will Ferrell — it’s not in the same league as “Anchorman” or “Step Brothers” — but second-tier Will Ferrell is still pretty good.
This gives a movie like Daddy’s Home the peculiar feeling of an in-house knockoff: It re-teams Ferrell with his Other Guys costar Mark Wahlberg in a domestic-comedy situation not terribly removed from Step Brothers , in theory if not in practice, spun out with less inspired lunacy than either McKay picture, but with the original creative team’s tacit blessing.
It’s pretty predictable what happens from here as Daddy’s Home adopts the same competitive spirit of most of Ferrell’s movies, from The Other Guys to Step Brothers to Blades of Glory.
The end result was amiable but slight with two misses for every hit, unable to live up to previous collaborations between Ferrell and writer-director Adam McKay (“Anchorman,” “Step Brothers”).
What’s most disappointing is that Anders’ Sex Drive burst onto the scene in a time of so many American Pie copycats, and did so with a hilarious disregard for playing nice.
The movie was directed and co-written by Sean Anders, who also had one hand or another in “Sex Drive,” “Hot Tub Time Machine,” “We’re the Millers” and “Horrible Bosses 2.” His cinematic wheelhouse is what you might call Schadenfreudian comedy, formulaic films filled with not-particularly-likable characters who suffer pain and humiliation for the audience’s amusement.
Sean Anders, the guy who directed Sex Drive (2008), That’s My Boy (2012) and Horrible Bosses 2 (2014,) foists another rotten nugget of mean-spirited mediocrity on an already beleaguered populace with Daddy’s Home, an unfunny, bland yet somehow also vaguely offensive “family-friendly” comedy featuring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg at the height of their self-parodic powers.
Sean Anders has written and directed his fair share of scrap-heap comedies (“That’s My Boy” and “ Horrible Bosses 2 ” stand out as especially dumpster-worthy), but “Daddy’s Home” is more in line with 2008 sleeper “Sex Drive” – simple but largely likable farces that do more by not doing too much.
Let’s compare the year’s studio comedies: Amy Schumer and Melissa McCarthy gave us the gifts of Trainwreck and Spy, Pitch Perfect 2 was almost as fun as the original and Sisters is a serviceable Tina Fey/Amy Poehler vehicle; on the bro-ier end of the spectrum, we’ve had Unfinished Business, Get Hard, Entourage, the not-bad The Night Before and now Daddy’s Home, the largely laugh-free reteaming of Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg after their 2010 cop spoof The Other Guys.
A half-decade ago, Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell found the right combination of sanity and insanity to make the buddy cop movie “The Other Guys” work.
Wahlberg and Ferrell were an inspired outside-the-box duo in the McKay-helmed “The Other Guys,” in which the former was even more button-up and the latter actively volatile.
Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg famously teamed up on screen in Adam McKay’s The Other Guys , in which they played two bickering NYC cops haplessly attempting to become heroes, one supposedly nerdy, the other apparently tough.
The movie reteams him with Mark Wahlberg, who also played cool opposite Ferrell's fool in the 2010 cop comedy "The Other Guys."
Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg were hilarious together when they teamed up in 2010 for cop movie spoof The Other Guys.
The movie's not set in Los Angeles, but it still finds time for that comedy ritual, familiar from Jack and Jill and Forget Paris, of killing time at a Laker game.