Step Brothers (**)

Wow, another movie about men who refuse to grow up. Isn’t that the plot of half the comedies Hollywood churns out? Mostly, they get stuck in high school mode, like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, or Matthew McConaughey in Failure to Launch, or Matthew McConaughey in Fool’s Gold. (He might have been in college mode in that last one, not sure.) In Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, David Spade painfully reverts all the way to pre-school status. But here, fortyish Brennan and Dale (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly) have not matured beyond, say, junior high. So I suppose they’re filling a comic niche. (Brennan wears a vintage Pablo Cruise t-shirt, which will amuse the handful of people who remember the 1970s pop group.) Never having left home, or gotten jobs, they wind up sharing a room when their parents marry.

This is the third collaboration between Ferrell and director Adam McKay, and easily the weakest unless you really have a taste for the silly. Anchorman and Talledega Nights had interesting settings to structure the comedy around, but this is just another men-acting-silly comedy, not unlike some Adam Sandler movies, minus the silly voices. Here, the boys hate each other in the seeemingly improvised first third, like each other but continue to annoy the grown-ups in the midsection, and then, in a sudden burst of plotting, turn around and fix everything in predictable fashion. (They even, in the post-credits epilogue, take revenge on pre-teen bullies.)

Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins as the parents are definitely assets because they play their roles so straight, and anything resembling subtlety helps here. Adam Scott also has funny moments as Brennan’s successful, but utterly obnoxious, brother. The leads, on the other hand, do things like destroy the kitchen sleepwalking. See, they both sleepwalk. Simultaneously. Hilarious! And McKay has taken the dictum “Don’t tell us—show us” to heart, so we get to see Brennan’s prosthetic (it would appear) testicles for at least 10 seconds when he rubs them on Dale’s drum kit. So funny. Boys who are actually in junior high may find the sight of old dudes acting like they’d wish to a scream, even if the R rating (due to langauge and raunchy humor) makes it tougher for them to see it. I was in the bathroom after the movie and heard two of them talking. One said, “You’re a dickhead.” The other replied, “Your mom’s a dickhead.” Seriously, it could have been a line from the movie.

IMDB link

viewed 8/5/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 8/6/08