In Theaters Jul 25 2008 @ 07:00 am
REVIEW: Step Brothers
Directed By: Adam McKay
Written By: Will Ferrell & Adam McKay
Starring: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins, Adam Scott
Running Time: 95 minutes
Rated R for crude and sexual content, and pervasive language
One of the charges often leveled against film critics is that they are “out of touch” with American audiences. The proof that is generally cited comes from placing each year’s average critical top 10 list and its top 10 grossing films side by side and seeing how closely they match. For example, 2007’s critical darlings, No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, respectively placed 36th and 66th at the box office. There are reasons for this discrepancy, primarily bad movie burnout amongst critics and the ever-present tension of art vs. entertainment, but I’ve always prided myself on being an unpretentious critic who loves his trash as much as his mise-en-scène (I did say I was unpretentious, right?). However, sitting in the theater watching Step Brothers, I wondered if I had finally crossed over to the other side. The audience was eating up every second of it like a lottery-winning coke fiend and I was just sitting there, wondering where that piece of food stuck behind my back molar was from, how long it had been there, and gosh it’s really about time I made a dentist appointment.
John C. Reilly as Dale and Will Ferrell as Brennan.
The film begins promisingly enough. Our introduction to the setup, in which two single parents (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins) get married and bring their two 40-something stay-at-home children to live together, takes mere minutes and is a shining example of taut, economical storytelling. When Brennan (Will Ferrell) and Dale (John C. Reilly of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) locked eyes for the first time across the yard to the strains of LCD Soundsytem’s North American Scum, I was surprisingly charmed. The dialogue, acting, cinematography, and music (heck, even the titles) effortlessly sucked me into the film and fully engaged me with the hokey premise. The scene felt like a combination of Wes Anderson and Napoleon Dynamite, and I found myself wondering, “Could this actually be good?”
This scene was funny... at least it was the first time I saw it.
No. No it couldn’t. Director Adam McKay quickly squanders whatever cache he earned in the first 10 minutes by dragging us down into a bog of repetition, redundancy, and sameness, and for those of you reading along with your thesaurus, you may have seen what I did there. The film offers nothing more than the flimsy premise that was promised in the trailer: two middle aged man-children hate one another before discovering that they are exactly alike. Exactly. Alike. The End. Almost every joke and gag riffs on that one idea (which, the production notes tell me, evolved from the dinner table scene in Talladega Nights), and there are only so many shouting matches/brawls/arrested development gags/scrotums that one can take before one’s molars become more interesting in comparison (and no, that last item was not a typo).
The redundancy doesn’t just lie in the film’s premise, but also in its vulgarity. The last time I saw a film that needed its mouth washed out with soap this badly was Clerks. The obscenities in Step Brothers are positively relentless. When did inserting the f-bomb into a sentence automatically make it funny? And when did shouting that sentence make it even more funny? And when did stringing together aforementioned shouted f-bomb-laced sentences become funnier still?
And no, the language itself isn’t the issue (although Step Brothers has given me hope that I’m not nearly as desensitized as I had previously feared). Superbad, which I would never discuss in polite company, nearly broke a few of my ribs I laughed so hard. The difference here is that the vulgarity is hung on a paper-thin foundation, and without sympathetic characters or a narrative that engages you in the slightest (i.e. The 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up), all of the profanity ends up eating away at your soul like battery acid. By the end I was mentally and emotionally exhausted.
The t-shirts in this film are, admittedly, awesome. Costume designer Susan Matheson is the queen of the Salvation Army.
I must admit there are some genuinely funny moments. The brothers’ efforts to sabotage their parents’ plans to sell the house (involving racially sensitive costumes and asphyxiation) had me doubled over, and two gloriously stupid sleepwalking sequences were visually priceless. But those moments were primarily physical comedy, whereas the majority of the film’s humor relies on the characters screaming profanities at one another in various states of undress. That’s just not my bag, baby.
In the interest of full disclosure, McKay’s previous Ferrell-Reilly vehicle, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, made my heart hurt. Numerous people disagreed with me, to the tune of $148 million at the box office, and the audience at Step Brothers was no different. I heard “epic,” “amazing,” and “that was way better than I thought it would be” as I left the theater. Suffice to say, this movie is going to reap great swaths of bank from the pockets of American audiences, and as much as I would like to, I can’t discredit the taste of millions of people. There is undoubtedly a market for this film, but I am (happily) not it.
on Jul 25 2008 @ 8:03 am 1. Phillip Johnston said …
Richard Jenkins is the only reason I’d pay to see this one.
on Jul 25 2008 @ 8:25 am 2. Evan Derrick said …
Trust me when I say that is not a good reason. Jenkins is one of the worst offenders when it comes to the language, which is completely off-putting because its like your sweet old grandpa telling you to go f yourself.
on Jul 25 2008 @ 8:48 am 3. Rick Olson said …
Even trash has mise-en-scène, Evan.
And I can discredit the taste of millions of people. It evidently sucks, look at all the trash that makes so much money.
One other thing: if you think Richard Jenkins is a grandfatherly figure, you haven’t seen, oh, say, Six Feet Under
on Jul 25 2008 @ 8:52 am 4. Pat said …
I wish John C. Reilly would go back to working with Paul Thomas Anderson and other good directors and stop doing dopey comedies. He’s way too good an actor to be wasting his time and talents on crap like this.
on Jul 25 2008 @ 9:03 am 5. Luke Harrington said …
If I can trust your plot synopsis, I think we can credit the audience’s delight to the trailer, which gave them a complete synopsis of the entire movie. American movie audiences love it when they don’t have to follow the plot for themselves.
Wait…I mean…I’m not arrogant and pretentious.
on Jul 25 2008 @ 10:22 am 6. Daniel said …
“When did inserting the f-bomb into a sentence automatically make it funny? And when did shouting that sentence make it even more funny? And when did stringing together aforementioned shouted f-bomb-laced sentences become funnier still?”
Of all the flaws and misfires in this movie (and there are a lot of them), this was the one that I had the most trouble understanding. The audience was shrieking in delight with every obscenity. I wasn’t confused; I was disturbed, and a little scared. Where’s the comedy?
on Jul 25 2008 @ 10:41 am 7. Eric said …
I concur. Of course, you probably already knew that since I was sitting by you. And good commentary on film criticism.
on Jul 25 2008 @ 10:52 am 8. Evan Derrick said …
Rick, I’ve seen a bit of Six Feet (isn’t Jenkins the dead dad?), but I was primarily thinking of The Visitor when I made that comment. And, true, trash does have mise-en-scene, but I just wanted to get a pretentious French cinema term into a review of an Apatow comedy.
Too true, Pat, too true. Where are the days of Magnolia? If Reily isn’t carefule he’s gonna pull a Cuba Gooding on us.
Thanks for validating me, Daniel. With the squeals of delight from the audience, I was wondering if I wasn’t just being really prudish.
A lot of the meat of this review came out of our discussion, Eric. I’m finding it more and more of an asset to see films with people so they can help me gather my thoughts afterwards.
on Jul 25 2008 @ 11:44 am 9. Daniel said …
I’ll plagiarize myself re: Reilly’s new obsession with idiotic comedies -
John C. Reilly, prior to 2005:
Casualties of War
Days of Thunder
Hoffa
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
The River Wild
Boogie Nights
The Thin Red Line
For Love of the Game
Magnolia
The Perfect Storm
The Anniversary Party
The Good Girl
Chicago
Gangs of New York
The Hours
The Aviator
John C. Reilly, since 2005:
A Prairie Home Companion (I actually never saw it)
Talladega Nights
Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny
Year of the Dog
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
The Promotion
Step Brothers
on Jul 26 2008 @ 10:30 am 10. K. Bowen said …
It’s better than Talladega Nights, but I’m not sure that’s a great standard.
on Jul 26 2008 @ 3:18 pm 11. Paul Lawson said …
Was it Corn or Roast? I hate when I get Corn stuck in my teeth.
on Jul 26 2008 @ 3:49 pm 12. Evan Derrick said …
I think it was a piece of almond off of Eric’s desk.
on Jul 26 2008 @ 9:18 pm 13. Brandon Tysinger said …
*Raises hand.* I have been proudly out of touch with the American audience since 1986. And to the other comments, Six Feet Under is the best television show of all time…period.
on Jul 26 2008 @ 10:33 pm 14. Evan Derrick said …
Well, I would say both Lost and Battlestar Galactica can give Six Feet a run for its money, but they have some glaring flaws (even though I love them both). So, Brandon, I’ll just put The Wire up against Six Feet and claim that it is the best television show of all time.
Regardless of which is ‘best,’ I think we can all agree we’re experiencing a golden age of television. People will look back fondly on things now in 30 years.
Oh, and by the way, welcome to MZ Brandon. Glad to have you.
on Jul 27 2008 @ 8:29 am 15. Luke Harrington said …
Yep, what with The Moment of Truth, Who’s Your Daddy?, Are You Hot? and Trading Spouses…truly a golden age. Savor the moment, friends.
on Jul 27 2008 @ 11:15 am 16. sartre said …
I doubt that Step Brothers has the humor and smarts in it that your review showcases, Evan.
And, Daniel that was a really telling pre- and post-2005 comparison. Nicely done. It saddens me to see Reilly in the most artless populace entertainment. I think he and Ferrell have a terrific talent for comedy but they squander it on the lamest of high concept vehicles.
Trash can be enjoyable and inventive, but you know - most trash is trash. Calling a film out as falling into this category, and backing your conclusion up with persuasive reasons, doesn’t automatically equate with being a pretentious critic. I find very few critics pretentious, off the top of my head Armond White, and sometimes Andrew Sarris, come to mind.
What I don’t always understand is why a film like Step Brothers might be a relative box office failure with its main target audience yet something equally repetitive, and filled with redundancy and sameness :-), is a hit. Now that’s an analysis I’d like to see – when trash works as box office gold and when it doesn’t. Then again, if we could accurately answer this question the studios would be knocking at our doors.
on Jul 27 2008 @ 12:26 pm 17. Alexander Coleman said …
Interesting, review, Evan–I particularly liked all of your points about how outside of the “mainstream” you (and I, and others) apparently are. Thank God.
Daniel, interestingly the one comedy you missed, Robert Altman’s farewell film, A Prairie Home Companion, is by far the most worthwhile of the lot and I don’t begrudge John C. Reilly showing up in that one bit. That was one of my Top Ten of 2006, a very fine piece of Americana from a wonderful director exploring many of his own interests very well. You should actually see that one.
Aside from that one film, though, I do not understand why Reilly has been sidetracked into such lame, pitifully dumb “comedies” over and over. For a while I was thinking he was going to be a fixture in the Scorsese-DiCaprio Train, but as you note, for a few years now he’s been on more of the Will Ferrell Train.
on Jul 27 2008 @ 1:45 pm 18. Evan said …
As to why Reily is off in Apatow/Mckay/Ferrell ha-ha land when he could be working with Paul Thomas Anderson, the answer is probably no more complex then that he is just having fun. While The Departed might have had a lot more credibility to it and earned its actors a lot of critical respect, I’m guessing that Step Brothers was much more fun to make. I’m also guessing that the paychecks are much better, too.
sartre, thanks for the kind words. Perhaps I was too forgiving, but the people in the audience loved this movie. I mean, really really really loved it. I was kind of overwhelmed by the response, and as much as I wanted to say it, I couldn’t just go “they’re all stupid sheep and don’t really understand good comedy.” They saw something to like, and I felt an obligation to acknowledge that. The film is trash and probably won’t exist very long past its DVD release date, but it provided a lot of entertainment to those people for that 2 hours. That has to count for something, I guess.
And I just checked the BO reports, and Step Brothers did $30 million, which I guess isn’t too bad. I’m going to assume that TDK stole all the thunder again with its $75 million take, and the 20-30 male demographic that Step Brothers targeted were seeing Batman for the second time.
But you’re right, that is the grand question: why does some trash (Daddy Day Care) succeed magnificently and other trash (Kicking and Screaming) bomb like Britney Spears? The American audience, she is a fickle creature, is she not?
on Jul 28 2008 @ 5:24 am 19. Thadd Harrington said …
I just wanted to say, “Thanks for reviewing this and not the Dark Knight.” Now, when I go see it tonight (no, I haven’t seen it yet. Give me a break, I’ve been working 10 or more hours in a cornfield everyday since it came out) I can actually watch the movie and enjoy it without having a review I’m mentally following along to compare it to. Originally I was going to make my thanks sarcastic, but the more I thought about it, the more serious I became.
But seriously? You think this is the golden age of television? Are you kidding me? Now that Hysteria, M*A*S*H, Animaniacs and The Cosby show are off the air, what else is there?
on Jul 28 2008 @ 11:54 am 20. sartre said …
I didn’t mean to imply that people who derive enormous enjoyment from films like SB are deluded or halfwits. I respect their taste, just don’t share it. I want films to be made for them, just as I want ones made for the readers and writers of sites such as this. I was taking the perspective of what those here would generally agree fell into a “trash” category - possessing the very qualities you derided. The point I wanted to make was that those who judge such films as trash are no more deserving of being viewed as pretentious or elitist than those who love them are of being viewed as morons. It’s all a matter of taste.
on Jul 28 2008 @ 12:00 pm 21. Evan Derrick said …
Oh, I wasn’t thinking that that was what you were implying, sartre. I agree with you completely, and I think the other group gets the lions share of the films (which has always been and will ever be - they outnumber us significantly, and so those films make more money for the studios).
It is, so often, a matter of taste. It’s a wonder we try to form opinions at all sometimes.
on Jul 28 2008 @ 12:43 pm 22. sartre said …
We’re just lucky that specialist taste films don’t require enormous budgets, and arguably benefit from not having them.
For many years friends encouraged me to seek out opportunities to write film reviews for local rags. I protested that there was little point in doing so because the tastes of most readers differed from my own. I found much mainstream fare formulaic and dull. So what kind of taste guide could I be for the majority of readers? One of the very special pleasures of the internet is that those with minority tastes can so readily find like-minded souls to share our ideas and enthusiasms with.
on Aug 09 2008 @ 3:44 pm 23. Cinexcellence said …
I have to admit, I really enjoyed it. Aside from some questionables, it was pretty good.