Daddy's Home (2015)

* ½ out of ****

I don't know if there has ever been a movie star that I've hated to love and loved to hate more than Will Ferrell. Most of his movies are so stupidly asinine that I would rather gouge out my own eyes with a barbeque fork than watch them a second time, but occasionally he does a movie that is so funny it hurts. “Elf”(2003), “Anchorman”(2004), “Stranger Than Fiction” (2006) and “Step Brothers” (2008) are all brilliantly funny.... but as far as I'm concerned you can take all of his other star vehicles and burn them for the benefit of humanity.

“Daddy's Home” isn't quite the offense to the senses that most Ferrell vehicles are, but it isn't anything worth remembering either. Ferrell is Brad Whitaker, a wet-rag type who appears to have learned everything he knows from self help books. He's married to divorcee Sarah (Linda Cardellini) and he loves her and her two kids. The kids at first resist him but eventually come to love him thanks to his constant involvement and endless patience. Brad can't have kids of his own, and as he is one of those guys for whom being a Dad is all that matters, the evolution of his family has his life exactly where he wants it.

That is until the kids' real father Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) shows up. Dusty is a “bad boy” type, and when he hears that his kids have a new father figure he rushes back planning to sabotage the family and insert himself back in. He and Brad do everything possible to undermine each other, and Dusty always seems to be one step ahead.  This convinces Brad that he's in a fight to maintain his relationships with Sarah and the kids, as he doesn't realize is that it's his responses to Dusty's behavior that is causing rifts, not Dusty's behavior itself.  To save the family he just needs to find himself again and stop trying to be "better than Dusty".

How warm and fuzzy.

While all the shenanigans are going on, I found this movie extremely tedious. There are a few laughs but the characters behave at all times like half wits, so even when something funny befalls them it is more stupid than comic. It's enough to pass the time but little more. This changes somewhat in the last reel, once Brad believes he has lost the love of his wife and kids – there is some real feeling and some nice moments in those last 20 minutes. But you do have to sit through 75 minutes of pretty ridiculous crap to get to it.

Overall it's one of Ferrell's better “bad” efforts, but nowhere near being good enough to be one of his good ones.