DADDY’S HOME – The Review

Every holiday, millions of people make their way to the local movie theater for some fun, cinematic action, comedy, romance, or adventure. Unfortunately for DADDY’S HOME, it offers none of the above.

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg team up again for the all new broken family comedy. Brad Taggart is a mild-mannered executive at a jazz radio station who seems to have everything that he’s ever wanted… a great job, a loving wife, and two wonderful step-children. He’s living the daddy dream until the children’s biological father Dusty comes back into the picture. Now, Brad is in a battle for his family with a bad boy who seems to excel where he doesn’t. The result is chaos.

I get what they were trying to do here by bringing Ferrell and Wahlberg back together. They were trying to recreate the same comedic chemistry that THE OTHER GUYS had. True, Ferrell and Wahlberg are great together, but that isn’t enough to save this film. It all starts with the script. We’ve seen oddball pairings in film before. It gets boring unless there is some sort of direction or substance behind it. Unfortunately, none of that was offered in this script.

The whole film felt lost, and the comedy had no real direction. It felt like they couldn’t decide if they were making a family comedy, or going more gallows. That doesn’t really work for a movie like this. They needed to pick one or the other. Instead, it danced back and forth in a sad attempt to find middle ground. Forty-five minutes into this ninety-six minute snooze-fest I was completely bored and ready to leave. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Director and screenwriter Sean Anders doesn’t have a great track record with his films. His top two being WE’RE THE MILLERS and HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. I mean, DUMB AND DUMBER TO was embarrassingly bad.

My problem is not with the actors… especially the children. Owen Vaccaro and Scarlett Esteves were terrific. My problem is with the flow of the film and the script. Did none of the actors realize that the script had no direction? Were the actors not able to improvise? Something tells me that there are a ton of jokes that were left on the cutting room floor that could have greatly improved this film. I guess we’ll have to wait for the bonus features.

It’s a shame to have such a stink bomb in theaters for the holidays. This should have been a mid-January release.

Overall Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

DADDY’S HOME is in theaters December 25th

For more info: daddyshomemovie.tumblr.com