Review: Daddy's Home

In Daddy's Home, Will Ferrell plays Brad, gratefully wedded to Sarah (Linda Cardellini) and enthusiastically committed to his role as stepdad to her two children, Megan and Dylan (Scarlett Estevez and Owen Vaccaro).

Bighearted Brad, unable to have kids of his own due to an accidental overexposure of radiation on his new essentially decorative testicles, is the kind of dad anyone would wish for, but he's had to work hard to win over the initially distant and slightly resentful kids. One can fully understand how overwhelmed with optimism he is when Megan's latest artwork features him with a knife in his eye ("It's the first drawing where I'm not already dead. It's progress!"), why he would want to take a selfie of the moment when Dylan confides how he's being bullied in school, and why he would uncontrollably sob with happiness when Megan asks him to the Daddy-Daughter school dance. Ferrell is easily endearing in these early scenes, and Daddy's Home might have ended up a warm and funny family film.

Instead, just as Brad is beginning to feel like he's part of the family, his wife's ex-husband and the kids' father, swaggers back into town. Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) is everything Brad is not: masculine, muscled, a total badass with leather jacket and motorcycle included. Dusty finagles a weeklong invitation from Brad to stay at the house and, though Sarah is wary of her unreliable ex, the understandably threatened Brad knows how important it is for the kids to spend time with their father.

The problem is Dusty isn't just looking to mend fences, he's looking to reclaim what he left behind, and his attempts to undermine Brad not only on the homefront but in the workplace cause Brad's insecurities to come to the fore. Within the space of Dusty's weeklong visit, Brad is electrocuted, nearly kills himself riding on Dusty's motorcycle, and is publicly humiliated when he exposes himself as he's trying to produce a sperm sample in a fertility clinic. It's all meant to elicit laughter, but intermittent half-hearted chuckles are the actual result.

By virtue of the wildly inappropriate and wholly unrelated tales of his sexual and marital history, Thomas Haden Church's character is the most amusing of the lot. As Brad's boss Leo, he encourages Brad to play dirty with Dusty...until he meets Dusty. "If this guy was my wife's ex, I'd put a bullet in my skull," Leo tells Brad. Cardellini, Hannibal Buress as a handyman who becomes another inadvertent houseguest, and Bobby Cannavale as the fertility doctor are all wasted. There is a clever cameo by John Cena, but one may have to wait until a completely unnecessary sequel for his presence to have any potential.

As for Ferrell and Wahlberg, they never quite reignite the surprising odd-couple chemistry they displayed in 2010's The Other Guys. The main problem is the set-up itself. It is a premise rich with comic possibilities, but Ferrell and Wahlberg spark when they're working with and not against one another. There's no reason why Daddy's Home couldn't have been tweaked to have Brad and Dusty adjusting themselves to the new family dynamics without resorting to a stupid pissing contest. The one-upmanship could still exist; ditto for the neuroses affecting both men. The third act of the film actually settles into that mode of thinking and is all the better for it.

Daddy's Home

Directed by: Sean Anders

Written by: Brian Burns, Sean Anders, John Morris

Starring: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini, Thomas Haden Church, Hannibal Buress, Bill Burr, Bobby Cannavale, Scarlett Estevez, Owen Vaccario, John Cena