Will Ferrell and Adam McKay re-team, with the help of John C. Reilly, for their third picture together and falls way short of being as good as their previous entries.
Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (Reilly) are both 40 something men still living at home with their parents. Nancy, (Mary Steenburgen) Brennan’s mom, meets Robert (Richard Jenkins), Dale’s dad, at a medical conference and they hit it off immediately and quickly get married. They proceed to move into Dale’s house and Brennan and Dale are forced to share the same room as they begin to wage war on each other with feverish sibling rivalry.
The two start off as bitter enemies before finding a common enemy in Brennan’s younger brother Derek, who is stuck up, successful, and pretty much a major douche bag. As Dale and Brennan begin to bond they begin concocting ridiculous dreams and begin to perform silly and ludicrous acts as they bond even further.
As their antics begin to interfere with the life of Nancy and Robert, a deadline is laid down for the boys to get jobs and move out so that the couple can go on their sail boating trip around the world.
I will stop here, as this is about everything the trailer reveals, but is pretty much 2/3 of the movie’s material is covered in a simple paragraph. But if you are going to see this movie, you aren’t going for the plot because there really isn’t one. You are going for the gags and jokes, and unfortunately they are fairly hit or miss; when one of the best laughs is a fart, you know you are barely treading water. Anyways, a lot of the material is just plain dumb, for no reason other than simply being dumb. It’s just a series of stupid, silly, shit that is moderately humorous at best on most occasions. I will admit, the movie made me laugh out loud on a few occasions and the final bit after the credits was the funniest scene of the film, but the movie is filled with way too many dead spaces that you are just left thinking, “what the hell?” and not in a good way.
The acting by the two leads is done surprisingly well though, as the nail the adolescent shtick and never falter through out. Reilly and Ferrell must have had a blast filming this but their fun didn’t translate into us having fun as much as they probably would have liked. Adam Scott is pretty good as the douche brother, but he also was involved in his fair share of misses in the film, car singing worst scene in a movie this year. Special shout out to Kathryn Hahn who steals every scene she is in as well as the wife of Derek, I will let one of the genuinely funny pieces of material be a surprise though. Jenkins and Steenburgen both seem a little out of place in this film though, and it’s hard to buy Steenburgen as Ferrell’s mother as well. The couple just seems awkward and you can see them thinking about what ridiculous line they can come up with before the deliver it, and usually it just involves them dropping an f-bomb.
Speaking of the f-bomb, which I think can be absolutely hilarious if used right, it was just thrown around like they filmmakers thought it would be funny to just utter the word. It literally seemed to be used as a device for laughs, “hey, look, we said fuck, isn’t that funny?” Anyways the cursing was so random and only in there for the sake of saying hey we can curse, it just didn’t come over as funny as cursing can be in a film/TV if used properly, i.e. the bleeped out cursing in Arrested Development.
Anyways, in the end, Step Brothers is a marginally successful comedy that could have been a lot better. The humor is simple, stupid and there is zero story whatsoever. It pails in comparison to the best stuff Apatow has produced, 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Sarah Marshall, because it doesn’t have a heart or soul, and isn’t as fun and silly as the other Apatow/McKay collaborations Anchorman and Talladega Nights. Granted those later two films grew better with repeat viewings as you caught more of the one-liners, and I am sure there are a couple gems left to be discovered in this, but I don’t think it is going to boost itself up that much higher then it currently is sitting at; rent it.
D