Review of Daddy's Home 2 (2017) by Shpostal — 09 Dec 2017

A sequel to a movie I only attended because my wife thought it was funny. Normally she knows funny when she sees it, but in this movie I can not concur. Humor in Hollywood seems to be of two varieties - clever, subtle and innovative, or it's childish, predictable, and relies on truly stupid premises and appeals to the lowest common denominator of viewers, primarily those who dig cliched slapstick, potty and fart jokes or some combination of the two.

It's kind of a situation where the writers think if the audience "gets" the joke, they think it's funny. I've known people who were otherwise very intelligent compassionate worthy folks whom however were totally lacking in a sense of humor.

These are the types "Daddy's Home 2" I think is catering to - movies where people laugh because they think they're supposed to at the right places. John Lithgow should have known better than to touch this dog, as should, well everybody except Will Ferrell, whom, in my view, is one of the unfunniest people to ever claim to be a comedian.

Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson, equal shame on both of you. The plot, if you can call it that, involves Gibson and Lithgow meeting their respective families and decide to have a single big family Christmas.

Lithgow and Ferrell are ultra sensitive touchy feely wimps and Gibson and Wahlberg, especially Gibson, are the crude rough and ready types, or at least are supposed to be, but thanks to the weak script any opportunity for some real humorous conflict is passed up.

Of course the movie is a hit - it's Christmas themed, and millions of people will try to celebrate the worst commercial greedy phony holiday of all by attending pathetic bait like this. But its very cliched primitive attempts at being funny ruined it before it ever started.

Pratfalls and lame sight gags are the stuff of vaudeville and the earliest televised humor, along with the old movies where every joke had to be ten feet tall as humor in entertainment evolved. "Daddy's Home 2" singlehandedly sets truly funny Hollywood humor back to about 1920.

At least then we didn't have to listen to the movies.