{"id":38179,"date":"2015-12-28T11:05:11","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T16:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=38179"},"modified":"2015-12-28T11:05:11","modified_gmt":"2015-12-28T16:05:11","slug":"daddys-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2015\/12\/daddys-home\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cDaddy\u2019s Home\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The latter half of 2015 brings us two new releases that easily have the potential to be the most annoying films of the year. They are \u201cAlvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip\u201d and \u201cDaddy\u2019s Home.\u201d After enduring Will Ferrell\u2019s performance in \u201cDaddy\u2019s Home,\u201d I think I might have been better off with the intentionally-annoying Chipmunks. This is yet another movie where Ferrell\u2019s shtick basically consists of him screaming and being obnoxious. Ten years ago, I was a defender of this style, arguing that he was bringing energy to his roles. I\u2019ve since grown weary of it, and I can only imagine how grating it must be for people who didn\u2019t like it in the first place.<\/p>\n

Ferrell plays Brad, loving but unappreciated stepdad to Dylan (Owen Vaccaro) and Megan (Scarlett Estevez). Brad has been married to their mom (Linda Cardellini) for some time and they\u2019re just now starting to show signs of warming up to him. But then out of the blue, the kids\u2019 long-lost biological father Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) invites himself over for an extended stay. The kids are overjoyed at the idea of Dusty coming back and Brad feels pushed aside. If he doesn\u2019t win their affections now, he might lose them forever.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not wrong to feel this way. Dusty is blatantly trying to win \u201chis\u201d family back, and he scores points effortlessly. Dusty, according to this film, is basically the coolest guy in the world. He rides a motorcycle, travels the world, is friends with celebrities, is in tip-top physical shape, and is more skilled than Brad in pretty much every area. Brad tries over and over to outdo Dusty, only to fail in increasingly spectacular fashion.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019ve used the word \u201cwin\u201d now twice to describe what Brad and Dusty are trying to do with the kids, and that\u2019s appropriate. Both are being selfish and not really doing what they do with the kids in mind. Dusty wants to have a family to call his own, but doesn\u2019t seem to have long-term plans to contribute to the household, as illustrated by his aversion to mundane activities like dropping the kids off at school. Brad is happy to do these things, and we\u2019re supposed to root for him because he\u2019s willing to work harder (as opposed to Dusty\u2019s grand-but-easy gestures), but I kept getting the feeling that he\u2019s doing all of this so he can feel better about himself without caring much about the kids. Sure, he\u2019s been doing this since before Dusty showed up and he had an opponent, but he\u2019s a little too quick to proclaim himself a great dad with suspiciously little mention of his actual impact on the kids\u2019 development.<\/p>\n

The humor is mostly based on Brad embarrassing himself and Dusty putting himself over. Thomas Haden Church plays Brad\u2019s boss who\u2019s always telling inappropriate stories about himself. Bobby Cannivale plays a fertility doctor who\u2019s quick to inappropriately compliment to Dusty\u2019s body over Brad\u2019s. Hannibal Buress plays a handyman friend of Dusty\u2019s whose mere presence is inappropriate. Seriously, the main gag with the character is that he\u2019s just\u2026 always there.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever seen a comedy about a klutz desperately trying to impress people and things always going wrong, you\u2019ve seen \u201cDaddy\u2019s Home.\u201d The only halfway decent gag is the concept of conflict resolution through dancing, and even then, Ferrell screaming dance terminology like \u201cserved\u201d detracts from those scenes. Did you like the humor in the two-minute trailer for this movie? If you didn\u2019t, I doubt you\u2019ll like this movie because it\u2019s 94 more minutes of the same thing. If you did, I still doubt you\u2019ll like this movie, because the humor has 94 more minutes to get old.<\/p>\n

One and a Half Stars out of Five.<\/p>\n

\u201cDaddy\u2019s Home\u201d is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, crude and suggestive content and for language. Its running time is 96 minutes.<\/p>\n

Robert Garver is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at New York University. He has been a published movie reviewer since 2006. Feedback is welcome at rrg251@nyu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The latter half of 2015 brings us two new releases that easily have the potential to be the most annoying films of the year. They are… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}