No Business like Bro Business

By Adam Pope August 7, 2008 Issue

It has been two years since Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly struck box office gold with Talledega Nights, and their newest attempt, Step Brothers, delivers the same kind of movie experience—hilarity with a twinge of pity.

And it is hard not to feel bad for Ferrell’s character Brennan, a 39-year-old unemployed lush who never followed his dream of being a singer and lives at home with his successful businesswoman mother Nancy, played by Mary Steenburgen. You feel even worse for Dale (Reilly), whose prominent doctor father Robert—played perfectly by Richard Jenkins—has no luck convincing his son to leave the house at 40.

In a bizarre twist of fate, Nancy and Robert meet each other, fall in love, and get married, causing Brennan and Dale to become an absurd and remarkable thing—middle-aged stepbrothers. Their inability to get along—and destructive prank war—causes Robert to eventually move out, prompting Brennan and Dale to hatch a desperate plan to reunite their family.

The plot alone is enough to push the tickets, but the performances by Ferrell and Reilly are so spot-on, so delightfully immature and blissfully irresponsible, that the audience has no choice but to give in to the movie’s delinquent charm. The funniest moments occur when Dale and Brennan are forced to enter the job world, in which they attend interviews as a “two-man terror tag team” and dress in tuxedos they find in their father’s closet. It becomes clear early on that no one is willing to hire the buffoons, and eventually this realization pushes the reserved doctor over the edge.

Jenkins is brilliant as the father figure, growing increasingly depressed and enraged by the asinine antics of his adult boys until he is eventually driven to the bottle and out of the house. Steenburgen plays the mother figure to perfection, with an endless amount of patience and compassion. This is nothing short of miraculous in light of the circumstances.

Step Brothers marks the first film by Talladega Nights and Anchorman director Adam McKay to bear an R rating and it is rightfully deserved. The hour-and-a-half film is a testament to the true destructive power of language if left up to a pair of overgrown teenagers. If the more colorful words could be described as “f-bombs,” then the film would be a crater-ridden battlefield devoid of both life and intelligence. This sinful dialogue is coupled with a multitude of scenes involving both graphic body humor and uncontrollable gas that push the envelope for what the audience will tolerate.

But when was the last time you bought a ticket to a Will Ferrell movie because of your love for highbrow humor?

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