THE concept of adult men behaving like bad little boys has been done so frequently that it must be about time for Judd Apatow's groundbreaking gross-out comedy where grown men shower, shave, go off to work and return at 6pm to take out the bins. But
not yet. Step Brothers reteams Will Ferrell and John C Reilly, who appeared together in 2006's Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby, and now co-star as two jobless 40-year-old men who still live with their parents.
Ferrell is Brennan, who rides in the back seat of his mom's car, cries a lot and is repeatedly tormented by his successful younger brother Derek (Adam Scott). Reilly is Dale, who lives with his dad, loves martial arts and Star Wars, and has 30 years of porn in his treehouse. It's unclear whether Dale and Brennan are supposed to be just immature or deranged, but to call either one a man-child would probably be giving children a bad name.
When Dale's dad (Richard Jenkins) falls in love with Brennan's mother (Mary Steenburgen, looking way too young to be a 40-year-old's mother), the two families blend, and the two sons are forced to share a bedroom. The result is a power struggle of alpha adolescents that includes taunting each other over the dinner table, and culminates in a defiant Ferrell desecrating Reilly's treasured drum kit by rubbing the skins with what I dearly hope are prosthetic testicles.
Eventually, however, they discover they have a lot in common. Both are interested in martial arts and dinosaurs. They share the same taste in T-shirts, they are in thrall to Animal Planet, especially during shark week. And they both like the pretty ladies, although a cloudy uncertainty descends when women actually turn up and start expressing an interest in sucking the face off one of them.
The two hairy boys cement their relationship when Dale meets and takes exception to the supercilious Vanilla Ice-worshipping Derek, the kind of tasteless control freak who makes his family sing four part harmonies of Guns 'n' Roses songs. After Dale bops Derek on the nose, the lads go from feuding foes to goofy buddies, staging karate competitions in the garage and building themselves bunk beds out of wood and gaffer tape. "Imagine if we'd had these when we were 12," enthuses Brennan when they mess around with night-vision goggles. "Even better," says his stepbrother. "We got them when we're 40!"
As a united front, these boys are dangerous, and thanks to the manipulative Derek, the newlywed parents decide to sell the house and take a world cruise, forcing the siblings to enter the real world via a string of clueless job interviews that bring out the worst in the two candidates.
Step Brothers is the sort of cheerfully gratuitous, silly comedy that is built around one joke, which it then bashes repeatedly into the ground until it reaches New Zealand. Naturally, the first busy, spirited 30 minutes prove unsustainable and things start to fray, and compared with Talladega Nights, this is a transgressive bagatelle. But, luckily for this film, Ferrell and Reilly were born with no shame or sense of personal dignity, especially in the scene where they are both beaten up by a gang of 12-year-olds and forced to eat dog poo. Around this point it's perhaps kinder not to recall that John C Reilly is an Oscar-nominated actor and Woody Allen once thought Will Ferrell could slot right into one of his high-foreheaded neurotic comedies.
Yet even though Step Brothers might wipe a good 10 points off your IQ, there's a misplaced nobility about the determination of its two writer-actors to see a scene through to its most unnatural conclusion. Reilly's awkward first kiss with Derek's wife, Alice (Kathryn Hahn), is easily the ugliest lip bump in movie history. A hug between brothers goes on just long enough to make all concerned uneasy.
Somehow Ferrell has become our chief satirist of masculinity, yet where else can this go?
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On general release from FridayThe full article contains 702 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
