Daddy’s Home 2

At Lit­tle White Lies tow­ers, we, like many oth­er jour­nal­is­tic out­lets, rate films by using the time-hon­oured star rat­ing sys­tem. That is, five stars denotes the movies we adore and one star for the movies that we absolute­ly don’t adore. The ques­tion often aris­es: ​“is it pos­si­ble to give a film zero stars?” That is, to sug­gest that it offers no appar­ent redeem­ing fea­tures at all.

The answer is not real­ly. On a pure­ly tech­ni­cal lev­el, we can’t admin­is­ter zero stars because our online con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem would read that as a fault – as if we’d neglect­ed to include a piece of per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion on the page. But on a crit­i­cal lev­el too, zero stars does seem a mite dras­tic – to sug­gest that some artis­tic endeav­our or oth­er has a com­plete­ly neu­tral val­ue. Almost as if it doesn’t exist with­in the space-time continuum.

Let’s draw on the film Daddy’s Home 2 as an exam­ple here. Dur­ing it’s 100 minute run time there is prob­a­bly about two min­utes of mate­r­i­al that could be described as pass­able. By ​“pass­able”, that means not active­ly bad. So on a 100 point scale, we would have to say that the film earns two out of 100, which means that it would be unfair to award the film zero stars. In fair­ness, the film has 0.1 stars, but we’re not able to work with dec­i­mal points, so at the top and bot­tom of the scale, things are round­ed up.

Even though, as you can see, we have giv­en this film a deserved one star out of five, the real­i­ty is that it’s clos­er to zero than one. It feels nec­es­sary to make that point clear before mov­ing for­ward. Let’s not mince words: this film is an abom­i­na­tion, an explod­ing Christ­mas white dwarf of awful which offers no obvi­ous ratio­nale for either its pur­pose or exis­tence. The final 10 min­utes are so obscene as to board­er on the sur­re­al. It almost achieves some kind of inverse tran­scen­dence – like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but where the evo­lu­tion­ary process is dialled back­wards instead of forwards.

Will Fer­rell, once as reli­able as a vin­tage Volk­swa­gen when it comes to screen com­e­dy, goes through the man­child motions as swad­dling, over emo­tion­al patri­arch Brad. It’s a won­der why he didn’t call out some of the dis­mal com­e­dy set pieces here, the most mem­o­rable of which involve him pour­ing hot coco on his chest and being kicked in the face by a tod­dler on a swing. A pro­gres­sive duel-pater­ni­ty part­ner­ship is filled out by Mark Wahlberg as Dusty who does lots of high-pitched bitch­ing while try­ing keep time as a hard-ass.

With­in the first few scenes the pair decide upon a fam­i­ly Christ­mas, which involves invit­ing their fathers over for the fun. The usu­al­ly great John Lith­gow goes full-tilt fruity as Brad’s touchy-feely pa, Don, while Mel Gib­son is stunt cast as Dusty’s old man, a vol­canic douchenoz­zle a glint­ing, right wing rel­ic from the 1950s who gets his kicks from goos­ing blondes, being sick­ened by any­thing that might be con­strued as ​“gay”, and con­sis­tent­ly pro­mot­ing the neces­si­ty of Amer­i­can gun ownership.

It’s all depress­ing­ly slop­py, a hor­rid slog with no actu­al sto­ry and noth­ing that could could even char­i­ta­bly be described as a good joke. If we could go no stars, we would. It’s hard to imag­ine some­thing worse would come along any time soon, but ya nev­er know…