Thursday, 28 March 2024

Comedic perils of parental rivalry arrive in 'Daddy's Home'

DADDY’S HOME (Rated PG-13)

There are two things to know about the comedic reunion in “Daddy’s Home” of Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, once again polar opposites that previously carried the day when they were mismatched detectives in “The Other Guys.”

First, the slapstick humor is crude and raunchy often enough to be extremely questionable family-oriented entertainment.

That’s why it seemed surprising that the screening was set up so that critics could bring along younger kids.

Second, this is type of film that one must grant is sufficiently predictable in many ways and yet leads to some dumb fun, which many critics are going to dislike.

Perhaps they were duped into bringing their grade school children to the screening and now seek payback with bad reviews.

For the rest of us, the overriding consideration is whether “Daddy’s Home” might provide enough laughter so that our concern about a PG-13 rating is mitigated by having the good sense not to take young kids to this kind of movie in the first place.

It’s good to see Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg back together on screen, this time around as parental rivals vying for the affection of grade school kids who need the nurturing of the stepdad but yearn for the reckless fun times with their cool biological father.

In familiar typecasting, Ferrell’s Brad Whitaker, the sensitive beta male, is now married to Sara (Linda Cardellini), the mother of Dylan (Owen Vaccaro) and Megan (Scarlett Estevez).

Brad is an executive at the Panda, a smooth jazz radio station rated the third most popular in the nation, where his boss Leo Holt (Thomas Haden Church) is fond of giving marital advice while telling absurd stories about his many failed marriages.

Driving a sensible Ford Flex family car, Brad wants to be a model stepfather, often reading from the self-help book “Step by Stepdad” and trying hard to win over bratty kids that have been drawing crayon pictures of the nuclear family with Brad depicted in various stages of distress.

Along comes Mark Wahlberg’s Dusty Mayron, the ultra smooth alpha male father who rides a Harley, wears cowboy boots and often takes off his shirt to expose a well-sculpted muscular torso, thereby revealing a true contrast to Brad’s basic nice guy timidity and flabby physique.

That Brad is essentially insecure and unsure of himself may have a lot to do with his inability to procreate. A flashback shows that Brad suffered a blow to his manhood as the result of an accident with an errant dental x-ray machine.

Having returned to the family scene with macho swagger, Dusty senses an emerging chasm in the household that he may exploit in order to reclaim his patriarchal role.

It’s not without irony that Dusty enjoys telling bedtime stories to his little tykes about the noble king being the superior person in returning to the castle to protect the kingdom where the step king has failed.

At first, Brad is seemingly seduced by Dusty’s self-assured charm offensive, trying a bit too hard to be his friend even though Sara has knowingly warned that her ex-husband is potential trouble.

Trouble arrives quickly in the guise of very competitive games to win the hearts and minds of the young children for the title of the finest dad, with Brad constantly one-upped by the cunning, persuasive Dusty.

The competition goes from the ridiculous to the sublime, and along the way Dusty manages to turn others against Brad, even convincing African-American handyman Griff (Hannibal Buress) that Brad is a racist.

Dusty does not confine his damage to the Whitaker household. On a visit to Brad’s radio station, he lucks into a chance to become the on-air voice of the station’s identity, thereby securing a handsome residual income.

The outlandish competition goes to extremes. Dusty builds an awesome tree house fit for an entire family, while Brad stages a full-blown Christmas celebration with expensive gifts during the summer.

Some of the humor is a bit cringe-worthy such as the visit to a fertility doctor where Brad and Dusty are reduced to the primitive state of exposing their manhood for the sake of medical examination.

Sexual innuendos, questionable at best for a younger audience, aren’t confined to clinical assessment. This and other forms of more adult-oriented humor are just part of the territorial contest between the father figures.

“Daddy’s Home” is filled with plenty of goofy antics, which are not only downright conventional and predicable, but on the whole prove to be quite funny.     
 
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

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