Review of Daddy's Home (2015) by Tjman09 — 12 Jan 2016

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg have good comedic chemistry, if you need real proof look no further than The Other Guys, this isn’t quite as funny. If you’re hoping for something like The Other Guys, these two films share a few similarities but are ultimately very different films. Daddy’s Home has its stretches of good humor, but ultimately drags on, and offers nothing really new to the comedy genre. It should be clarified that the film has a good amount of humor, so if that’s the main concern Daddy’s Home should deliver.

The comedic premise of this film is exactly the same as The Other Guys, in that Will Ferrell plays a bland man while Mark Wahlberg brings some chaos into his life. The film is fairly funny and proves that there’s still water in that well, for the moment. The film has a fun tone, that’s infectious, even the most serious people could find themselves smiling during stretches of the film. However, these stretches are too inconsistent.

The film is only an hour and a half but feels more like a two-hour film. While many of the film’s gags work, many other gags feel like long stretches of awkwardness, that just drag on. To further that, while the film is funny, it’s never hilarious, or belly-aching funny. The film ultimately leaves a feeling of emptiness, because it tries to be funny, but ultimately fails for stretches, and drags on.

Maybe the worst thing the film does is what it doesn’t do, which is offer any original concepts to the comedy genre. When you get so many talented people working together and you get jokes that are rehashes from previous films they did or rip-offs of Bridesmaids jokes, it’s disappointing. The film is dumb, in the sense of logic within the story, but also in terms of effort, as a film that only rehashes old jokes is just lazy. It seems unfortunate that the filmmakers couldn’t make a denser story to fill the framework of the film.

In the end, if you’re looking for a comedy that has a good amount of laughs in it, that you can watch with the family, Daddy’s Home will get the job done. However, if you’re searching for the next great comedy, that offers new ideas to the somewhat cliched comedy genre, this isn’t it. In the end, Daddy’s Home is somewhat funny, features good chemistry from it’s two leads, and has some decent character development, but fails on the originality test.