Wahlberg delivers Instant hit
Instant Family (M, 117 mins) Directed by Sean Anders Reviewed by
★★★★
Mark Wahlberg in a comedy about adoption? Nope, I wasn’t expecting a lot more than a retread of Wahlberg’s Daddy’s Home series either, with maybe a few hugs and life-lessons to round out the running time after the usual cavalcade of sight gags and ruinously predictable comedy fallbacks. And then, just to keep me on my toes, a pretty good and occasionally quite tough-minded little gem comes whistling out of the projector.
I love it when that happens. Instant Family truly has got disposable dross written all over it. Wahlberg is fine when he’s doing his Matt-Damon-by-Pam’s routine in a succession of mostly OK-ish action thrillers. But as a comedic leading man, Wahlberg usually just seems a bit too intense and insecure to ever really land a gag.
Instant Family trades on that exact quality, perfectly. Wahlberg and Rose Byrne (The Internship) are Pete and Ellie.
They’re married, making a living by flipping houses, and wondering what to do with their lives once the TV is turned off.
Adopting a trio of troubled kids seems like a less-than-obvious solution. But hey, they already have a dog. Into semi-prosperous suburban bliss come teenager Lizzie (played by Isabela Moner, who starred with Wahlberg in Transformers: The Last Knight)
and her two younger siblings. Birth mum is a meth addict and Pete’s inquiry as to the dad is met with derisive laughter. What follows is an enjoyable and often pleasingly sharp film. Instant Family hits the expected gags, but also finds a fine balance between the saccharine and the salty. Enough so that when the film’s romcom instincts do overwhelm the sometimes nettlesome drama that Instant Family occasionally needs to be, the effect is quite jarring. Writerdirector Sean Anders (yes, the
Daddy’s Home series is his) wrote
Instant Family partly from his own family story. It shows.
There are some unfakeable moments here, as well as some dialogue – Wahlberg’s ‘‘I don’t want to be like the white guy in Avatar’’
monologue is inspired – that sounds too odd to not be authentic.
Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures) and Tig Notaro (Dog Days)
steal every scene they get as the family’s case officers. At its best,
Instant Family is a likeable and admirable film. And at its worst, it’s still a lot better than the film I was half-expecting to see.