Unfunny Step Brothers a Horrifying Waste
I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but for the eleventh time this year Sony Pictures (whether it be through their Screen Gems, Columbia or Tri Star divisions) has made a bad movie. And while the new Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers isn’t near as heinous or unforgivable as 88 Minutes, Prom Night, Untraceable or You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (easily still the year’s worst motion picture), the line separating them all is so thin it’s almost not even worth discussing it.
Will Ferrell, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins and John C. Reilly in Sony Pictures' Step Brothers
Once again, the star of Elf, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory and Semi-Pro (to name five) plays an adult child at war with the world’s supposed unfairness. In fact, it could be said that, save for Melinda and Melinda and Stranger than Fiction, Ferrell has played the exact same character in each and everyone of his films, stretching himself towards a different direction as alien to him as properly enunciating the English language is to George W. Bush.
This time around the comedian plays Brennan Huff, a sometimes employed 39-year-old loser still living with his successful mother Nancy (Mary Steenburgen). All that changes when she meets and marries ocular specialist Robert Doback (Richard Jenkins), the duo moving in with him and his 40-year-old son Dale (John C. Reilly) just days after the ceremony.
Needless to say, neither middle-aged kid gets along, especially after they’re made to sleep in the same bedroom. Soon both are causing havoc on an almost unimaginable scale, even going so far as to maybe ruin Robert’s cosmopolitan retirement plans. It’s a great big mess, and if these two men can’t grow up soon not even their parents are going to be around to lend them a helping hand.
For about ten minutes during the highly hysterical prologue I had fantasies that this was going to be a winning darkly uncomforting black comedy of the first degree. The setup is priceless, both Ferrell and Reilly laying the groundwork for a pair of characters Blake Edwards and John Landis both would have adored once upon a time in their directorial primes.
But as soon as the credits end and Ferrell and director Adam McKay’s screenplay (working from a story written by the star, Reilly and Knocked Up guru Judd Apatow) takes flight things fall to pieces with an almost unforgiving suddenness. Nothing here is even remotely funny. From pointless frontal crotch shots (what have you wrought Borat and Forgetting Sarah Marshall) to scenes of people licking crusty dog poop nothing works. Worse, it’s fairly assaulting, much of it feeling as if both of the headliners were standing right beside me bludgeoning my head with a baseball bat ordering me to laugh.
Poor Steenburgen and Jenkins look like a couple of dear caught in some highly blinding headlights, both of them doing all they can to try and make the most of this mess even as the script (and their costars) go out of their way to undermine the pair at each and every turn. It’s almost as if they were making it all up on the very spot, and while moments here and there might work as “Saturday Night Live” skits plastered together inside an almost two hour monstrosity of a movie they’re almost impossible to endure.
In all honesty, I’m kind of over it. WALL-E aside, this has been a brutal year for comedy, and I’m almost to the point where I’m starting to think I’m never going to sit inside a theater and laugh again. A bit harsh, yes, but that’s what pictures like this one and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan have reduced me to. Take my word on it; Step Brothers is a waste of time not worthy of anyone’s hard-earned dollars at the turnstile.
Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)
- reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Additional Links
- Step Brothers Theatrical Trailer
