Stepbrothers Review
By Colton Gomez | 04/07/24 | 9:38 P.M. Mountain Time
Comedy, Drama | Rated R | 1 hr 35 min | Film Release Date: July 25, 2008
“Stepbrothers” is good as long as it delivers on laughs. Nobody goes to a pure comedy movie for the story, they go because they want to laugh. The story has to be just good enough, but not get in the way by taking itself too seriously. I think director Adam McKay has found a nice balance between story progression and laughs. (If you’re looking to see an intense story of blame, regret, and personal anxieties, but short on laughs, we call those dramas.)
Brennan Huff (Will Ferrell) and Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) become stepbrothers when Brennan’s mom marries Dale’s dad. If it weren’t for the attached middle-aged sons who are jobless, aimless, extremely child-like, and entirely dependent on them, this couple seemed destined to share the later years of their lives in bliss. With the four of them under one roof, nights get chaotic, and fights break out. These two grown men are coddled and tolerated until their newly married parents plan for a retirement getaway and put the house up for sale. This forces the stepbrothers to feign adulthood and look for jobs. Brennan, 39, and Dale, 40, go through the motions of a tropey couple in a romantic comedy in which they dislike each other, warm up to each other, become best friends, break up, and reunite.
It's a shallow movie that will slip right out of movie goers’ heads the moment they exit the theater. It’s doing just enough to keep them in their seats with laughs, but with a forgettable story full of borrowed tropes, you can’t expect them to love it, or even really like it. I would say a lot of movie goers would tolerate it because the ticket wasn’t cheap and at least it’s something to do.
Some of the jokes and gags are funny and I found myself laughing several times, but I have no desire to watch it again. I’m glad it’s only one hour and thirty minutes long, though at times it feels like it’s really dragging. These are the moments when the stepbrothers are at odds with each other, and the background characters get their chance to be funny. Those chances are sullied. Like a returning gag between Reilly and a married woman (Kathryn Hahn) who come together in moments of sexual intensity that is just unpleasant to witness. These moments are also when the story/plot takes over and mechanically applies the movie formula of a three-act structure. The jokes stop and things just happen because the movie needs to finish doling out this production-line Hollywood comedy. Nobody is all that funny or clever in this film. The sophomoric side of my humor enjoyed some bits, but none of the jokes are smart or memorable.
It’s got some cathartic commentary for parents who have had to shuffle off or be patient with late bloomers. The parents feel this inner tug-o-war between loving their children and wanting them gone. Nancy Huff (Mary Steenburgen) is the more lenient and forgiving of the couple while Robert Doback (Richard Jenkins) is the stricter one, with a mind only for his boat and his woman. He takes an immediate liking to Nancy’s second-born son, who is a successful world-traveler in the helicopter business. As expected, the two sons drive a wedge between Robert and Nancy, seeing them differ on parenting styles and priorities.
Ferrell and Reilly behave more akin to twelve-year-old pubescent boys than forty-year-old men, and even get bullied by some of the former. After some time, it can be tiresome to sit through another scene where Ferrell and Reilly act like immature boys. This might seem like an over-the-top SNL skit with medium success, but it’s a one-and-a-half-hour movie with a trite story for a spine and the only moments you can latch onto are gags here and there. The comedic moments often involve crude language, yelling, improvised insults, and physical comedy. It’s like watching two members of a primitive society adjust to the modern world of decency, or perhaps those are just children.
Ferrell and Reilly do a good job performing their roles—not that they are very demanding. It’s an incredibly simple film with really nothing to say, except maybe, don’t sell your soul to corporate greed, don’t be a child, but find some middle ground between the two. That’s about it. But to search for meaning in a pure comedy film is like going hunting with a popgun. The bulk of the film is jokes about family, sibling rivalry, marriage, being an adult, and growing up. Really, the focus of the film is trying to make the audience laugh using juvenile humor and hoping to maintain audience retention by contextualizing it all in a recycled storyline with overused, shallow characters..
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