Welcome back to the realm of effective comedy, Will
Ferrell! After two disastrously unfunny sports-parodies (Semi-Pro
and Blades of Glory) and one undercooked dramedy (Stranger
than Fiction), you have finally come to redeem yourself.
After all, it’s about time; for being considered one of the
funniest men in Hollywood (if not the premier comic actor), you
sure were in quite a slump there. It’s good to see you return to
form with Step Brothers, Mr. Ferrell.
But enough with the imaginary
conversation-making. Maybe I’ll write an entire letter-review to
Ferrell when Bucket Reviews becomes popular enough for him to
actually have a chance at reading it, but until then it’s much
easier to keep things on third-person terms. Nonetheless, my
point remains the same: Step Brothers marks something of
a homecoming for the actor after a near-two-year dry spell. And
what a return it is: the movie represents pure Ferrell –
bombastic, outrageous, silly, and just plain wonderful.
With that all being said, it may
come across as odd that my praise for Ferrell stops there. Yes,
the gifted comedic actor owns every frame of Step Brothers
that he appears in, but he’s hardly the primary reason for the
movie’s success. After all, Ferrell is essentially here playing
a cuddlier version of Jackie Moon from Semi-Pro and a
less-talented version of Chazz Michael Michaels from Semi-Pro
(and so on and so forth). Funny as the guy is, his talent is
characterized by acting as outrageously as possible in different
versions of the same persona. He is equally as wacky and as
hyperbolic in every performance he commits himself to, always
walking a very fine line between effectiveness and
ineffectiveness.
I don’t think Ferrell is really
responsible for what side of the aforementioned line a given
performance falls under, either. Instead, the energy around him
does. His outlandish, unrestrained style feeds upon the talent
he works with and, in Step Brothers’ case, said talent
points Ferrell’s gifted comic abilities in all the right
directions.
Much of the movie’s success rests
in its funny, inspired premise. Ferrell plays Brennan Huff, a
forty-plus year-old man who still lives at home with his mother,
Nancy (Mary Steenburgen). Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) is in the
same position: he’s an out-of-work, middle-aged couch-potato who
depends on his father (Peter Jenkins) to bring home the Bread.
Chaos erupts, however, when Nancy and Dale connect on a date
(largely due to their shared, peculiar little family-dynamic),
get married, and move in together. Brennan and Dale don’t quite
get along—in typical seven-year-old-minded fashion—now having to
compete for the affections of their parents with their new
housemates. On top of it all, their new parents—each of the two
now provided a partner to reinforce their opinions—are pushing
hard for them to find jobs and potentially move out of the
house. Sooner than later, the two come to realize that they have
more in common than they originally thought—laziness and
near-retardation being the two main traits shared—and team up to
wildly funny results.
The real marvel of Step Brothers
is the work of longtime Ferrell-collaborator Adam McKay. As
Ferrell’s co-writer and director on the film, McKay knows
exactly what boundaries Ferrell’s performance should respect,
understanding when his lead actor is effective and when he goes
overboard. As a result, the Ferrell-jokes that work can be
savored by the audience because they aren’t drowned out by a sea
of unfunny attempts to fill time, as was the case in Semi-Pro
and Blades of Glory. Step Brothers—partly due to
its hard R-rating—is consistently hilarious, with two of the
best comedic scenes of the decade so far. (Without giving too
much away, one involves a certain anatomical part touching a
drumset and the other showcases Ferrell’s opera-singing
abilities.)
But McKay and Ferrell’s brains
aren’t the only ones that were dedicated to the cause of
crafting a consistently-ingenious motion picture. I would be
committing a small crime if I were to chalk the movie’s success
solely up to McKay and Ferrell; they represent only half of the
equation. Just as daring and hysterical is Ferrell’s co-star,
John C. Reilly, who approaches the role of Dale in just the
right way, giving the character enough of an edge to crudely
contrast with Brennan but enough geekiness to embrace his
newfound step-brother come the movie’s second-act turnaround.
While Reilly may not be afforded as outlandish or as show-offish
of bits as Ferrell is—notice that the two standout passages
mentioned above are credited to his co-star—he still provokes a
great deal of laughter. And combined, the two actors share
comic-chemistry that is every bit as good (while 1,000,000 times
cruder) as that of a great cinematic buddy-pairing such as, say,
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
Also of note is the work of Peter
Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen, who don’t have any uproariously
funny moments of their own, but provide strong support for their
more-boisterous co-stars. The two veteran actors thankfully
ignore the opportunity to imbue any unnecessary emotion in their
characters, rightly choosing to depict them as naïve individuals
rather than sappy, compassionate parents who long to help their
aching children. In other words, Jenkins and Steenburgen accept
that their characters shouldn’t be in the limelight of the
picture and don’t overplay them, instead merely offering solid
comedic footing on which Ferrell and Reilly are able to
springboard as much gleeful tomfoolery as possible.
In the end, the movie’s material
doesn’t really leave room for the narrative to enter a realm of
greatness—what recent comedy’s has?—but it does lend to a fun
time at the multiplex. (It’s also worth nothing that the movie
ends a three picture slump for producer Judd Apatow; hopefully
his soon-to-be-released Pineapple Express will continue
the upward trend.) Rounding out the month of July, the jovial
Step Brothers represents a great way for mainstream
moviegoers to recover from the epic nature of The Dark Knight,
the tiring mythology of Hellboy II, the eye-straining 3-D
of Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the crappy
third-act twist of Hancock. Inconsequential summer
blockbusters don’t get much better than this one.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 7.22.2008
Screened on: 4.9.2008 at the AMC Burbank 16 in Burbank,
CA.