Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg go another round, this time with three additional fathers in tow to their adventures of mayhem. In ‘Daddy’s Home 2’, Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) and Brad (Will Ferrell) have joined forces to provide their kids with the perfect Christmas. Through their newly found union of being best friends, the duo have the father game on lockdown, offering the best of both respective worlds to the children they love. However, their newfound partnership is put to the test when Dusty’s old-school, macho Dad (Mel Gibson) and Brad’s ultra-affectionate and emotional Dad (John Lithgow) arrive just in time to throw the holiday into complete chaos. On top of it all is the macho Roger (John Cena) who pushes Dusty through the pools of embarrassment with his own macho stature. If father knows best, these kids are truly in trouble. ‘Daddy’s Home 2’ is written and directed by Sean Anders, and is rated PG-13 for suggestive material and some adult language.
It was only a week ago that I saw ‘A Bad Moms Christmas’, but the disheartening memory of that film has stuck with me for a new film based on similarities that more than ring a bell of coincidence in ‘Daddy’s Home 2’. I can’t nail down for certain why ‘A Bad Moms Christmas’ decided to move their release date up from the December debut that it was supposed to receive, but my shot in the dark is that someone on their production team got an early word or screening or ‘Daddy’s Home 2’ and concluded that it was the same movie, leaving the two films fighting for who would see the light of day of originality first. Besides the fact that this is a film about burdening parents coming to visit these extreme parents themselves, both films take place on Christmas, both feature scenes involving the theft of a Christmas tree, both diminish the return of the opposite sex in their films, and both even have the same ending in direction with the elder parents. One could write this off as ironic, but there’s something that stinks terribly within two movies that are only a week apart. A formula for a wrong that must be righted for two films that will inevitably stand side-by-side in my end of the year countdown because those glaring similarities can never separate as to which mirror image is better.
For every root that finds its way back to the central plot, this is very much Gibson’s movie. The arrival of this once prominent A-lister who has decided to join the ranks of slapstick humor does a great value to the movie, playing Kurt with enough rabid testosterone to field his own Expendables sequel. Considering the original film left us off with John Cena’s Roger coming into play, it seems strange that this film shutters him until the final half hour of the movie, leaving Gibson with the majority of screen time to hold down the fort. In fact, it’s easy to see where a re-write could’ve substituted Cena for Gibson as both imitate similar character attitudes and structures that thrust them into the light of temporary antagonists. As for progression, there’s very little of it with wacky experiences basically blazing the trail for what is to come over 95 hanging minutes. It feels like the writers got together a bunch of family ideas during Christmas and decided on which direction was the lowest possible hanging fruit to make them cater to the Ferrell school of humor. The film makes no attempt to hide or subdue its obvious intention into making this a male first movie. The females of the film offer very little substance or subplot that makes their place worthy in this sequel, leaving them biding their time until one of the male co-stars remembers that they are in frame, leading to a worst case scenario in a world that is building equality in film for the first time ever.
As for humor, nothing should surprise you from the adolescent mind of man-child Anders who wrote such timeless classics as ‘Dumb and Dumber To’, ‘That’s My Boy’, and of course the original film in this series that has already overstayed its welcome. Most of this slapstick offering misses its mark on setting some kind of precedent for consistency in its physical sequences, and its predictable timing can now be related to something like horror movie jump scares when the sound lowers just before something is about to pop out. The instances of witty dialogue far outweigh the value of returns to that of something that offers an elaborate stunt of flashes and pain to get its point across, as those were the only points during the film where I garnered a chuckle or two for the way these constant professionals carry the material. As like any movie (Especially ‘A Bad Moms Christmas), the film also tries the predictably cliched heartfelt center towards the end of the movie that reaches and fails like most comedies to cash in on that dramatic impulse that could instill a valuable message to those leaving the theater. I don’t buy it, and it never works for a second because these characters as people feel damned from the get-go. The final fifteen minutes even override this direction with a bat-shit finale where it feels like all hell and logic break loose in a sequence that casts more concern than care.
Like any Will Ferrell movie, it’s status quo that the child characters are more mature than the adults, but this film took things to new heights of defined endangerment that wouldn’t stand in any household. As parents, these six units are every bit as ignorant as they are promoting to the kinds of actions that kids should be punished for, bringing to life the demonic intuitions that impressionable minds are known for. A few of the examples for this film involve the younger kids playing with the thermostat during sleeping hours, the kids getting drunk on eggnog, firing off guns in the woods, and of course incest. Thankfully I was alone in the theater because anyone who laughs at this kind of material would really make me feel sorry for them, and while this kind of thing might’ve been provocative during the 90’s, comedies today require more intelligence and less barbaric in getting that coveted reaction that comic writers so desperately crave anymore. That desperation certainly rings true here, but always for the wrong reasons, and because of such ‘Daddy’s Home 2’ feels like being witness to a child destroying property in a supermarket. We want to say something to the parents, but it feels like those kids are who they are because their grown counterparts set the stage for them to shine.
As for performances, the chemistry is still very much there for Wahlberg and Ferrell even if the film feels slightly more focused on their parental units. A majority of this as I already mentioned is in Gibson who at first feels obvious in his villainous rage, but later won me over as the seams that tear this family apart from the inside. John Lithgow is also a welcome addition, reveling as Brad’s Dad (He has no actual name in the movie) with the kind of softie innocence that accurately depicts how Ferrell’s character has come to be. I’ve never really been a huge Will Ferrell fan, and nothing in this film won me over for his brand of humor. Wahlberg continues to show a versatility for comedy to work hand-in-hand with his dramatic thrillers, and I honestly could’ve used a little more screen time devoted to his rivalry with Cena to watch these two bulls collide at the horns. The sacrifice here is definitely Linda Cardellini’s character who played basically the trophy for the two males in the first film, and is now nothing more than a side note to chime in any time an unraveling humorous sequence needs further establishing reactions. It’s a noticeably bitter pill to swallow for any females watching who would like to see a single motherly instinct reflected on screen. To that I say, well, at least there’s ‘A Bad Moms Christmas’.
THE VERDICT – ‘Daddy’s Home 2’ gave me a holiday hangover seven weeks before Christmas. With juvenile humor and the slimmest of scripts creatively to boot, Anders second chapter in this series relies far too heavily on the same inept concepts in malicious intents that overstuffed the stockings of the first movie, leaving a second film that doesn’t work overtime to get the heart beating to either of its horrific characters or benign traditions. More fathers means less time for mothers, a true representation of the male psyche that has been plaguing Hollywood for decades.
4/10