Daddy’s Home review: Ferrell and Wahlberg are on top form in this otherwise run-of-the-mill comedy.
Daddy’s Home review
Daddy’s Home review: Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg re-team five years on from their very successful action/comedy outing The Other Guys in the new comedy from director Sean Anders and Ferrell and Adam MacKay’s production outfit, Gary Sanchez. Daddy’s Home, released across cinemas in the UK on Boxing Day, revolves around Ferrell’s Brad Whitaker, a newly married, very straight-laced character unable to father his own children due to a very unfortunate accident with a dentist’s x-ray machine a couple of years prior. Eight months into his marriage, while content and happy with his new life, Brad is also struggling to properly bond with his two stepchildren, and is tested further when the children’s real father, an apparent special-ops bad-ass named Dusty (Wahlberg), suddenly appears after a long leave of absence. After bargaining with Brad to allow him to stay for a week until he’s ‘redeployed’, the two butt heads and squabble over just who is the real-Daddy and king of the suburban castle.
Ferrell and Wahlberg’s initial teaming on The Other Guys was comedy gold, and their pitting against the perfectly cast Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson won over audiences back in 2010. Here, the two try to rekindle that magic, this time going at it alone in a comedy that delights, and equally grates from the off.
Daddy’s Home review
Ferrell is in familiar territory as the bumbling softy putting ’em up against Wahlberg’s burly, macho, alpha male. Plot miss-steps and grinding comedy pranks aside, both actors play to their strengths with Ferrell essentially playing the same character that we’ve seen him play so many times before (we’re thinking Old School, Elf etc), alongside a beefed-up Wahlberg as the meat-headed drifter Dusty. The film does however deliver on some laughs, with it hard not to smile at certain parts with Ferrell’s physical comedy playing off of Wahlberg’s more straighter humour, alongside some firm, though very wasted support from the likes of Bobby Cannavale and Linda Cardellini. Thomas Haden Church also shows up as Brad’s scene-stealing radio station boss Leo, a character who is constantly relating to Brad’s misfortune with stories of vice and failed marriages of the past.
Daddy’s Home review
This is very generic comedy fodder, and obviously very predictable, but that’s not to say it’s not enjoyable. Brian Burns, Sean Anders and John Morris’s script and Ferrell and Wahlberg themselves manage to make the two central characters likeable, despite the premise, and Anders proves that he a very capable comedy director.
Not a bad comedy by any stretch but not a great one either. Perfectly placed in a post-Star Wars holiday season, and released on Boxing Day to a wealth of festive hangovers, you could do far worse than Daddy’s Home.
Daddy’s Home review by Paul Heath, December 2015.
Daddy’s Home is released in UK cinemas from Boxing Day, December 26th, and in US cinemas from Christmas Day, December 25th.
