Daddy’s Home review: Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg in a miserable, gagless family comedy
12A | Dir. Sean Anders and John Morris ★☆☆☆☆
It’s a well established fact that the coolest dads are the ones who wear leather jackets, ride motorcycles and abandon their families to pursue a life of skidding menacingly in circles around lesser fathers. Conversely, the absolute worst dads are the ones who wear ironed shirts, have proper jobs and provide boring things like stability. Because, as any physics professor will tell you, stability is the exact opposite of skids.
In the entirely terrible family comedy Daddy’s Home, Mark Wahlberg plays the motorbike-straddling biological dad, who spontaneously reappears in his estranged family’s life in order to reclaim his oddly impartial and passive ex-wife from buttoned-down step-dad Will Ferrell.
For largely unexplained reasons, cool-dad is permitted to move in with the family and immediately sets about jokelessly undermining boring-dad at every turn, as both actors valiantly compete to create the biggest brown smear on their IMDB page.
Mark Wahlberg buys a dog, but the dog growls at Will Ferrell. Will Ferrell tries to ride the motorbike, but the bike crashes. Mark Wahlberg takes his penis out, and it is a bigger penis than the one Will Ferrell has got. A little girl says a rude word. Will Ferrell gets drunk at a basketball game. Everything resembles a joke, but they are hollow joke-eggs filled with sad air.
A miserable laughless vacuum, Daddy’s Home is riddled with awkward racism jokes, puzzling moments of CGI slapstick, and at least two improvised scenes that stretch on and on in search of a morsel of humour that never arrives. This film is an atrocious thing to have happened.