Boorish man-children fight unite in Step Brothers
The recent proliferation of extended-adolescence comedies surely can’t bode well for society. If the movies are to be believed the new millennium is dominated by self-centred man-children who will have to be dragged into maturity kicking and screaming.
In Step Brothers Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play two such characters. Brennan Huff (Ferrell) and Dale Doback (Reilly) are 40-year-old layabouts whose perfect worlds (such as they are) collide when their parents get married. Having gone through life in the most coddled manner imaginable Brennan and Dale have barely mastered the basics of social interaction — this new situation is so far beyond either of them that they have no choice but to lash out at each other their parents and anyone else who gets in the way.
With two unlikable protagonists acting like total dicks Step Brothers gets off to a rough start. Ferrell and Reilly are admittedly perfectly cast — both seem entirely comfortable spouting the inanity and profanity that Ferrell and director Adam McKay’s script provides for the characters and both convey a dim-witted sweetness that makes it impossible to hate them completely even at their worst. Their fighting is grating though as the novelty of seeing grown men act like eight-year-olds doesn’t last long.
Things pick up once Brennan and Dale realize that they have far too much in common to be enemies (“Did we just become best friends?”). For awhile at least the mean-spiritedness of the film’s opening subsides and it becomes genuinely tempting to take up the man-children’s side in the war on grown-ups. Sure they’re tearing their parents apart with their refusal to make even the smallest concession to maturity but look how much fun they’re having!
Of course this kind of arrested development can’t last forever and the film eventually takes Brennan and Dale through the requisite grow-up-and-get-a-job montage. It’s all done in a way that’s supposed to make viewers feel sorry for the two during their soul-crushing flirtation with adulthood but here’s the thing — the two have been so boorish that the soul-crushing actually seems like a good thing. After all these aren’t two heroic holdouts against a society that crushes childish whims they’re grown men who are content to coast on their parents’ goodwill for as long as fate allows. That might be good for a few laughs and Ferrell and Reilly certainly milk more than a few out of the material but all told it’s really just sad.
