Ferrell driving Home alone
Daddy’s Home 2 (M, 100 minutes). Directed by Sean Anders ★1⁄2
Were you a big fan of Daddy’s
Home? Nope, me neither.
But clearly a lot of people were, because it made a shed-load of money for a pretty modest investment. And there is a reliable equation for predicting exactly how many bums the sequel to a hit movie will put on seats. Putting a 2 in the title is just about the only near-sure bet Hollywood ever gets to make. Behemoth blockbusters with marquee names on the poster can die in a ditch, and often do.
But all Daddy’s Home 2 has to achieve is about 75 per cent of what the first film made and there’ll be high-fives and chicken dinners all round at Paramount Pictures tonight.
The film picks up a few months after the original ended. Mildmannered and paunchy Brad (Will Ferrell) is still making a great job of being husband to Sara and stepdad to Dylan and Megan. Sara’s ex – Mark Wahlberg, more or less parodying every other role he’s ever played – is married to Karen and raising step children of his own. The humour – what there is of it – is based on the conflict between how the two men believe children should be raised and Brad constantly attempting to prove his worth and masculinity to the bunchy little fountain of testosterone that is Wahlberg.
Christmas is coming and the two men’s fathers have been invited to share a joint family Yule. Enter John Lithgow and Mel Gibson into a scenario already groaning with contrivances and overpopulated with characters with little to do except orbit the two leads.
Gibson is a hyper-masculine bully who we are told is a retired space shuttle commander. Meanwhile, Lithgow is a vaguely sexless and simpering exsomething or other (teacher? social worker?) who is desperate to conceal from his middle-aged son that he and his unseen wife are getting a divorce. No, I didn’t understand why either.
With the cast in place, Daddy’s
Home 2 embarks on a disconnected series of sketches and situations that could only be described as a plot by someone who’s never looked up the word ‘‘plot’’ in a dictionary. Only a few scenes really work, and they are the ones in which we sense Ferrell has been allowed to improvise, or at least put his own spin on the writing. Ferrell isn’t everybody’s favourite performer, but when he’s on form he is one of the most hellaciously funny men on screen.
There are moments in Daddy’s
Home 2 when Ferrell gets close to the genius lunacy that set
Anchorman and Blades of Glory on fire. That the film’s strongest scene is set in an improv comedy bar seems almost a meta comment on the lousiness of most of co-writer/ director Sean Anders’ (We’re The
Millers) script. Other scenes, particularly Gibson instructing his grandson on ‘‘how to pick up girls’’, seem utterly tone-deaf and borderline toxic in this post-Cosby/ Weinstein/Ratner et al moment.
Daddy’s Home 2 probably does just about enough to justify its existence. But not really enough to make it worth paying money to see. – Graeme Tuckett