Daddy’s Home

Daddy’s Home sur­vives only on the good graces of its stars. Remove Will Fer­rell and Mark Wahlberg from the equa­tion, and all is dust. Not the roman­tic, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic kind – the dust you only dis­cov­er trapped under your fridge when you’re lying face-down on the floor to weep­ing over the irrel­e­vance of your own exis­tence. And, as you stare into it, you come to the real­i­sa­tion the abyss doesn’t even care enough to gaze back.

Daddy’s Home is a hol­low dis­play case upon which an irre­sistible pair­ing is propped. Fer­rell is the step­fa­ther to Lin­da Cardellini’s chil­dren. He is earnest­ness in its purest form. Sure, as an actor he’ll always be most remem­bered for the brash­ness of Ron Bur­gundy, but it’s here that the real core of Ferrell’s comedic iden­ti­ty lies. In opti­mism, in naivety; in us laugh­ing at inno­cence destroyed and a man slow­ly crip­pling him­self into one of those wretched, spite­ful crea­tures we recog­nise in ourselves.

Wahlberg is the irre­spon­si­ble tough-guy bio­log­i­cal father to Lin­da Cardellini’s chil­dren, only now return­ing after a life­time of aban­don­ment. He too pos­sess­es a comedic pre­cious­ness onscreen. Per­haps it’s due to his per­pet­u­al­ly con­cerned expres­sion, or the fact his voice always ris­es slight­ly at the ends of sen­tences as if con­stant­ly seek­ing approval from some unseen parental figure.

Brought togeth­er, both these actors deft­ly exploit those core fears and inse­cu­ri­ties of a chal­lenged father­hood. A bat­tle­ground not of thin, frag­ile mas­culin­i­ty, but one built on the pure, des­per­ate need for those forces of mutu­al love and parental ful­fil­ment. Des­per­a­tion always pos­sess­es a kind of innate ridicu­lous­ness, and so Daddy’s Home unfurls for itself a steady esca­la­tion of events. Attempts to win over the chil­dren (and the offi­cial denom­i­na­tion of ​‘Dad’) become increas­ing­ly ludi­crous: mon­e­tary brib­ing over bed­time sto­ries leads to poor­ly-judged motor­cy­cle skills leads to Christ­mas in the mid­dle of April. And so on.

Yet, the nat­ur­al beats of that ris­ing scale have large­ly been ignored here in ser­vice of a few, key set pieces. Indeed, this is one of those awk­ward­ly-paced come­dies that hangs itself entire­ly on three or four moments writ­ten specif­i­cal­ly for the trail­er; the rest of the film mere­ly poured into gaps like comedic mulch. Every­thing hangs on skate­board­ing tricks and forced Kobe Bryant cameos – moments of man­u­fac­tured spec­ta­cle, but not of spon­ta­neous, gen­uine humour.

Hon­est­ly, why not bin the screen­play and just let Fer­rell and Wahlberg impro­vise the whole darned thing? Daddy’s Home may be dust, but at least those two know how to make charm­ing, lit­tle dust bun­nies of it all.