Will Ferrell has headed up so many movies of the same type that there needs to be a new genre to describe it: man-boy comedy. He could join the gallery of comedians like Jim Carrey and Mike Myers, who have traded on their ability to make us laugh with infantile antics.
In “Step Brothers”, Ferrell takes this to his friend and collaborator, John C. Reilly, and they play a pair of step-brothers, both 40 year old men that live with their single parent. When the parents decide to get married, Farrell and Reilly are forced to move in with each other, and abuse each other out of hatred.
It’s mean-spirited, as Ebert noted, accompanied by frequent use of swear words and disturbing violent language that starts at dick-jokes and gets worse from there but what Ebert seems to have missed is that the film is actually good-naturedly mean-spirited, if I could take the liberty of making up a term.
This is a Judd Apatow produced feature, after all, and Ferrell and director Adam McKay wrote the screenplay together with so many child-men involved in the creation of the film, how could you ever expect it to even approach normalcy?
Incredibly, “Step Brothers” should be irritating and dull, but, somehow, the Ferrell-schtick keeps the film on its feet, producing bigger laughs than expected; even the jokes that fail badly are gone in a split second, with a new batch on the way, like a train of continuous joke cookies off a conveyor belt.
At its heart, though, “Step Brothers” is funny because of the haunting truth of the concept. A generation of children that grew up so overprotected and spoiled that they expect their parents to fulfill their role as caregiver, even as the kids enter and pass young adulthood.
Perhaps this aspect of the film is the most terrifying, even as we howl with laughter as Ferrell plays on a forbidden drum set with a nasty part of his anatomy, is that its not that far from the truth, not even that outlandish. Up until this point, my generation was one of entitlement, a murder of kids raised to believe that we’d all be rich and successful, destined to walk into executive pay at 25, then retire at 35.
What happened? With the current economic crisis and the shiver along the lines of confidence in the future, we’ve been reduced to bit-actors in an unpopular play. Much like “Step Brothers”, we’ve been forced to accept the harrowing truth that we’re only kings and queens in our own homes, and that the world is a tough place to find a seat.
I say:
Vicious and funny, this is comedy in the vein of “Anchorman”.
See it for:
Oscar-winning actress Mart Steenburgen using some foul language.
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