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.
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.
*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 ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Wow, this might be the Will Ferrell's laziest movie since Get Hard. No wait, this is Will Ferrell's first movie since Get Hard. Although it's also both. He's joined in this thankless endeavour*1 by comedic deadweight Mark Wahlberg, who starred in a Transformers movie that was less mechanical than this. Every step in the three-hand screenplay is heavily telegraphed, patronisingly executed and then called-back half an hour later, where it's congratulated by itself as it pats the audience on the back for remembering the thing they were just shown.
But let's be entirely fair, Daddy's Home doesn't fail as a formulaic, broad-strokes comedy. The film is every bit as slapdash and uninventive as it means to be, and as much as I'm bitching and moaning about it, I wasn't in the least bit surprised by anything that happened. It's not necessarily badly done, it's just blandly done, refusing to drive outside its own metaphorical coned-off safe area*2 and recycling the tropes from a hundred other slapstick, one-upmanship comedies while bringing nothing new to the shrieking party. Although even with a 12A certificate nerfing-out the worst excesses of the genre, the movie is still too tonally coarse to be the kids' comedy flick it clearly should be, and can't quite commit to either side of the dick-joke fence.
Considering Daddy's Home is just the single premise from the trailer stretched out for an hour and a half, it doesn't half drag its feet in telling that joke, and the more that the antics escalate (you've seen the punchlines in the trailer, remember), the more pedestrian it somehow becomes. Wahlberg at least appears to be enjoying himself a little as the resentful blowhard dad, but Ferrell's earnest counter-performance slips into autopilot with the first line of his sporadic (and needless) narration. Linda Cardellini and Bobby Canavale seem to spend their scenes silently consoling themselves that at least they're part of the Marvel universe now, and poor Hannibal Buress looks embarrassingly lost throughout.
If anything, the film is absolved slightly in that I've seen both leads in worse movies than this one, and I'm genuinely not sure if either can better themselves any more. Steve Carrell is off making waves in the grown-up's pool, Ferrell is still splashing around in his armbands…
Warning: The film also features the worst CGI-enhanced motorcycle gag you've witnessed this year, irrespective of many many or few CGI-enhanced motorcycle gags you've seen this year.
Oh, and I confess that I did laugh out loud in the film's finale when a young boy punches a young girl in the face, although I think that was just a release mechanism since I'd been sat there willing someone to be convincingly hurt for about an hour and a half…
If you're one of the poorly-behaved customers which surrounded me tonight on their annual post-Christmas cinema visit, chattering and yapping throughout the movie and generally acting like Screen 4 was their own living room, then apparently so.
Telly, if you must.
Hahahahaha.
Oh, probably.
If you're going to look me in the eye and tell me you enjoyed Daddy's Home, I expect you to have some weapons-grade reasoning to hand…
There isn't, although it is used for the skateboard/powerline gag in the trailer.
Daddy's Home stars Linda Cardellini, who was in the Scooby Doo movies with Freddie 'Kanan' Prinze Jr and Sarah Michelle 'Seventh Sister' Gellar.
*1 By which I mean that I'm going to thank no-one for this film.
*2 Although there was one moment in the third-act where the script suddenly tries its hand at being self-referentially meta, at which I thought "Oh, don't you fucking dare. You haven't earned the right to make fun of what a mainstream comedy-flick would do in this situation, since you're barely at that level yourself…". Although unlike (seemingly) the rest of tonight's audience, I didn't say this out loud. Plus, I didn't have to; I knew I'd be typing this...
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
