MOVIE REVIEW: 'Step Brothers'

Slightly longer "director's cut" of a review in today's Oregonian....

Are Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay getting tired of their own shtick?

The two previously collaborated on "Anchorman," "Talladega Nights" and that FunnyOrDie.com skit where McKay's 2-year-old daughter plays a foul-mouthed landlord. These are all minor (and highly quotable) classics of absurd comedy, or at least they go well with beer.

So it's a little disappointing to report that the latest Ferrell/McKay outing, "Step Brothers," is only fairly amusing -- with a couple of inspired minor characters and nary a gag or wacky wrestling match that can't wait for DVD. Frankly, the whole thing feels like a coast.

"Step Brothers" is less ambitious than "Anchorman" or "Talladega," and taffy-stretches a sketch-comedy premise. It's about two nearly identical unemployed 40-year-old man-boys (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly) whose clothing style and bedroom décor ossified somewhere in the late '70s. They each live with a long-suffering single parent (Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen).

Jenkins and Steenburgen meet at a conference. They bond over their idiotic, remora-like spawn and their desire to sail around the world. They marry. Everyone moves into Jenkins' house. The result is a pathetic, mirror-universe "Brady Bunch": Ferrell and Reilly battle, bond, test their folks' new marriage and contort with Bikram-like skill to avoid adult responsibility.

The big joke here is that much of the McKay/Ferrell script would actually play pretty straight if Ferrell and O'Reilly were replaced with actual child actors. But an hour-and-a-half of Ferrell and Reilly grappling with one another and reasoning like 7-year-olds gets tired -- especially when, for whatever reason, neither actor sticks his hand quite as far into the improvisational genius jar as he has in films past.

The movie succeeds in fits and starts, though. It finally goes joyously, absurdly off the rails in its final scenes. Adam Scott is perfectly loathsome as Ferrell's hyper-successful, condescending, smarmy, name-dropping younger brother -- and Kathryn Hahn is even better as his desperate nut-job of a wife. (The best scenes in the movie involve Hahn sexually fixating on Reilly.) I also liked that the parents aren't mere foils; Jenkins is hilariously fed up, and Steenburgen is a coddler, prone to praising the boys for their "enthusiasm and inventiveness." I just wish the filmmakers had brought a little more of each to the table this time.
____

C-plus; 95 minutes; rated R or crude and sexual content, and pervasive language.

'Step Brothers' (The Oregonian, July 25, 2008)