Step Brothers stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as men forced to live together when the former’s mother (Mary Steenburgen) and the latter’s father (Richard Jenkins) get married. Why do they have to live together? Because, even though one is 39 and the other 40, they have never moved out of their respective parent’s house. This is a movie with exactly one joke: watching a pair of men acting like spoiled, petulant, foul-mouthed, 16-year-old boys. This might have been a funny premise if we were watching two relatively normal men being driven into childish behavior by an odd situation. But these are not characters acting childishly: They are characters who from the moment we see them act as if they actually were children, whining, making faces at each other, being rude to their parents, sulking, breaking things during temper tantrums, and telling idiotic lies. There is nothing apparently wrong with either parent to explain how their sons grew up (I use the term loosely) this way. The film is like a tired retread of Dumb and Dumber, except that these two lack even the essential good-naturedness of the characters played by Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. After half an hour of this I considered walking out. But I stayed, figuring that the entire movie couldn’t possibly be like this. Wrong. I also stayed because the movie was co-produced by Judd Apatow, who aside from having co-written the recent remake of Fun With Dick and Jane has a very strong track record. Wrong again. (As if to prove that there isn’t some other Judd Apatow in Hollywood, Step Brothers has the requisite Apatowian scene of male genital nudity. In this case, I can only pray that a plastic prosthetic was used.) Step Brothers is arguably even worse than Mike Myers’ The Love Guru, which audiences sensibly avoided in droves in the two weeks between its release last month and its debut at the second-run theaters. But ranking the two would be like deciding which is the foulest of two month-old cat boxes. Let’s just say that they’re tied for worst movie of the year and pray to god a challenger doesn’t come along.
—m. faust
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