I went into Step Brothers with the idea that a movie based on 40-year-old men too stupid to live didn’t deserve my attention. Such morons already dominate reality television and are slowly taking over the world as everything seems geared toward the idiots or the children. Believing I fall directly in the middle of that pile (perhaps slightly skewing more toward child) I can never connect or find humor in watching people portray stupid people for laughs. Stupidity, to me, isn’t funny… it’s stupid. Little did I know, outside of the two main characters in Step Brothers being stupid, everyone else in the cast is questionable as well.
Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly star as Brennan Huff and Dale Doback respectively, two men still living at home with their parents. The story begins as Brennan’s mother (Mary Steenburgen) falls in love and marries Dale’s father (Richard Jenkins) and they end up moving in with Dale and his father. Acting as perfect 10-year-olds Brennan and Dale take to each other like oil and water until a series of events quickly find the two becoming best friends, a dynamic that is sure to break down before the end of the film setting up their all-to-inevitable reconciliation. Their fighting involves Brennan rubbing his scrotum on Dale’s drum set, house destruction and burying one another alive. Only a couple of common traits bring the two together, but if you are still with me up to this point just stop reading and go see the movie, you are a lost cause.
The disappointing thing with this movie is that Brennan and Dale’s stupidity is not the low light. In fact, I probably could have tolerated this movie had it not been for the ignorance of everyone else, on both sides of the family. Sure, Richard Jenkins as Dale’s father is a smart guy, but the way he acts would have you believing otherwise. Mary Steenburgen’s major accomplishment is that she looks incredibly good for a 55-year-old, but her character as well is just as dysfunctional as the rest of the cast.
Adam Scott plays Dale’s brother and he is an absolute nightmare of ego and pomp, so much to the point that he isn’t believable. His wife, played by Kathryn Hahn, is equally disabled leaving you absolutely no one to turn to in the search for a level head amongst the bunch. It is hard to consider something funny when everything is trying to be funny via the incorporation of stupidity. In this case you have a large group of characters, all with inadequacies, leaving the audience no one to identify with, which ultimately offers no counter to the stupidity [disguised as humor].
None of this surprises me as director Adam McKay has disappointed me twice before with Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Anchorman, two movies that had a handful of laughs, while both remain entirely redundant in a comedic world that is becoming the new dysfunctional genre just shy of horror. Ever since Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin people have been trying to up the ante, while copying the formula those two movies followed. Not only is it annoying, it just isn’t funny.
D-
