Step Brothers (2008)

Step Brothers is a film that doesn't claim to be anything else than what it is; under two hours of light and crude comedy with a cast of big names that we already know and love. Anyone eagerly anticipating this film is going to have their expectations well met and be thoroughly entertained. However I can't help but feel that this is a film where the comedic talents of Ferrell and Reilly sell themselves short. As a pair they hardly aim for highbrow sophistication but this film feels like a cruder and more cynical step away from their other films. After a short while the cheap thrill of seeing middle age men acting like 10 year old boys starts to become grating and, when considering their parents, the situations in the film are slightly depressing. Whilst watching the film my mind wanders to the obscene amount of money it probably took to produce, indeed it had a $65 million dollar budget, and yet how little it manages to acheive much merit at all in comparison to films with much less funding. Fans of Ferrell's work will find this amusing enough but their time will be better spent on a geniunely funny cult classic like Anchorman or even his more recent Mark Wahlberg-starring The Other Guys. John C Reilly was much more funny and a lot less desperate in Roman Polanski's engaging adaptation of Carnage. Overall it wasn't a complete ordeal but I did come away feeling that everyone's time could have been much better spent.