Review: Daddy's Home 2

Daddy's Home 2 (2017) - Who gives a shit? An old Carl's Jr Bag filled with human excrement.

       Last week I saw the movie A Bad Moms Christmas, which was a sequel to the wholley forgettable Bad Moms from a years ago. Even though it had a cast that was game, it had a terrible script and was blandly unfunny. A real turd, basically. But Oh Lord Almighty how I look back fondly on that day. It seems like a far-off paradise to me now. If you had asked me last week if A Bad Moms Christmas was the worst holiday comedy sequel featuring one gender of parents while their OWN PARENTS also come to visit and cause a real mess of things, I would have definitely proclaimed, "Of course! How could two movies SO specific and terrible, both with one parent who is overbearing and overemotional and one who is a rock'n'roll absentee type, both so nauseatingly rote, so childishly and lazily created, happen TWICE IN THE SAME WEEK?"
       Well fuck you, Daddy's Home 2. You take the fucking cake, you movie-equivalent-of-being-forced-to-watch-your-parents-have-sex. You are the worst thing a person could possibly see in a movie theatre right now.
       Daddy's Home 2 continue the story of Mark Wahlberg's Dusty and Will Ferrell's Brad, two co-dads who don't always see eye to eye on how to raise--aww, Jesus Christ, I can't even do it. I can't even be bothered. Want a synopsis (you don't)? Go to IMDB (don't do it). I feel ill. Mel Gibson and John Lithgow play the respective grandpas. Linda Cardinelli is there, sort of, in the thankless mother role. Okay, looks, I saw the trailers. I wasn't expecting to really 'like' this particular film, but setting a low bar for a movie just because it's a comedy sequel isn't fair. The filmmakers involved in this movie, and if you really think about it, A LOT of people who were involved to make this movie a reality, didn't have to make a shitty version of whatever this movie is. They could have, ya know, tried. The first one had at least a few moments based in character motivation that resembled a comedy.
       At least Bad Moms Christmas is rated R. Ferrell and Wahlberg know how to swear funny, that certainly could have helped. And while Bad Moms seemed to think saying "What the fuck" every couple minutes warranted as a joke, you still got some great Kathryn Hahn sass mouth (I do love her) going around to garner some laughs. But DH2 is stripped of absolutely anything interesting or provocative, so blandly fucking neutered. I'm not saying a movie needs swearing to be funny, but if youre not going to go with that approach, then you can't instead just have lazy, screechy physical comedy we've all seen a thousand times before. People get hit with snowballs no fewer than six times (is getting hit with a snowball funny? Has it ever been?) I lost count after 11 how many times Ferrell get hit by something. A great deal of the slapstick defies laws of physics and basic understanding of how human bodies and every-day objects work. Which, hey, wanna go bizarre and absurd? Why not? Just make something funny.

       Everything about the stunt casting (and it is stunt casting. He doesn't even act. He just chuckles with his gross crinkled paper laugh and slaps people with the back of his hand for emphasis. The whole. Fucking. Movie) to play Wahlberg's father made me feel dirty. It uncomfortably plays to all the worst things about Gibson's real-life persona. He's a macho man's man who tells his grandson to abruptly kiss a girl on the lips and then slap her on the ass after. Christ, he probably didn't even know he was on a movie set. And John Lithgow...is there. Look, I love Lithgow, and I hope he made a decent paycheck, but he adds literally nothing to this movie.
       I haven't even gotten to the worst part. I HAVEN'T EVEN GOTTEN TO THE WORST FUCKING PART, YOU GUYS. It's one thing to make a comedy that isn't funny, I mean, I'm not happy about it, but sure, waste our time. But the movie offends greater than just not being funny, it's so utterly tone-deaf to the way human beings interact and think and behave that as a result it's squirmingly unbearable to watch. There are four, let me repeat, FOUR different scenes where huge crowds of people gather around to watch this family argue or go bowling or...shudders...do improv. They are supposed to be emotional, or heartwarming, or...something, but instead they made me hoping for an aneurysm just so I could stop feeling so embarrassed.
        John Lithgow's shocking discovery (fart noise) that he and Will Ferrell's mom split up is actually revealed while Lithgow is called up to be part of an improv scene. I wish to god that sentence wasn't true. And the worst part is the audience is laughing the whole time. It was brutal. The end of the movie (which is seriously a twenty minute scene, all played out in front of a huge group of strangers at a movie theatre), involves a group song and three different people making proclamations of love while the crowd of whoeverthefucks cheer them on. I promise it's even worse than how I just described it. It is truly awful, some real non-human shit. In the last ten minutes the movie became about the meaning of Christmas and family when the 80 minutes that preceded it were solely about Will Ferrell's nuts getting hit.
       I could go on. I could spew more angry, hateful garbage about how creepy and weird this movie is (the young boy at one point kisses his step-sister and slaps her on the tush, and after another moment it is never mentioned again), but there's no point. It is offensively cruel and rude filmmaking to pander so low to the abilities of human people to understand human things. Do yourself a favor and see A Bad Moms Christmas.

Wow. This has been a real rollercoaster of a week, movie-wise, huh?

Grade: One million dead Christmas Wishes.

Also: Both movies end with the grandparents flying to Las Vegas to get wild and crazy. If either of these come to fruition as sequels I swear to god I'll have a breakdown, shave my head, and eat all my hair.