Review: Daddy's Home 2

Daddy's Home 2
Cert: 12A / 100 mins / Dir. Sean Anders / Trailer



Will Ferrell falls over six times in this movie. He's by no means alone in pursuing this basic comic staple, but on the leaderboard of Daddy's Home 2 pratfalls, Will's right there at the top. This festive follow-up to the 2015 movie which provided the lighthearted scheduling-alternative to The Force Awakens is an under-written, erratically paced, haphazardly directed exercise in box-ticking, button-pushing cinematic gibberish. John Lithgow falls over three times.

Helmed by Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, the two performers who effectively wrote the 21st-century appendix on The Formulaic Studio-Comedy Textbook, the 100 minute run-time is a collection of jokes they did last time, the jokes you'd expect them to do this time, and a climactic a cappella version of Do They Know It's Christmas. I wish I was making that up. Meanwhile, poor Linda Cardellini pads around the back of the screenplay looking for someone who's at least heard of the Bechdel Test, never mind up for trying to pass it. Added to the roster are the aforementioned Lithgow and Mel Gibson, as the central pair's dads. They're both quite fun*¹, if only because they haven't stretched this shit to breaking point already, like their screen-sons, but in the end this is an easy paycheck and they treat it accordingly. If you've seen the trailer for Daddy's Home 2, you don't need to watch the film*².

But it's better than A Bad Moms Christmas.

Well, writer/director Sean Anders is hoping you enjoyed and memorised the first Daddy's Home, because in the sequel he doesn't bother to introduce or re-establish any of the returning characters.



This is not a cinema film, despite having its entire climactic sequence take place in a cinema with a sense of completely unearned smugness.



…



It's not even the best work in this two-film series.



Probably not.



There might be one in the cinema scene, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
Let's say no.



Level 1: Qui-Gon Jinn's in this, after a fashion.





*¹ That said, Gibson needs to tread carefully. The troubled™ star clawed back some much-needed respectability earlier this year with Hacksaw Ridge, but this comedy turn leaves him standing in the entrance to De Niro Alley, an apparently one-way street of ill-will and diminishing casting opportunities. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Or to put it another way, You Don't Need To Watch The Film. Glad we cleared that up. ^{[ BACK ]}

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