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.