CINEMA: Step Brothers
So here’s the pitch: a middle-aged couple (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins) meet and fall in love and decide to marry. However, moving in together proves rather sticky because his grown-up snotty loser son Dale (John C Reilly) and her grown-up whiny loser son Brennan (Will Ferrell) both still live at home. Now, not only will they have to share their respective parents’ attention and affection, but also a bedroom.
From here on in things can only go downhill as Reilly and Ferrell act like five-year-olds throwing their toys out of the pram and generally having hissy fits – which is fun for about five minutes before it starts to get extremely tedious and irritating.
Watching grown men acting like spoilt brats can only hold the attention for a very limited amount of time and this is basically a one act sketch stretched exceedingly thin over a full-length movie. It also doesn’t have the quality of writing of The 40 Year Old Virgin, which at least tried to flesh out its loser main character. Here Dale and Brennan are just saddos with little or no redeeming features and extremely bad hair. Dee Pilgrim
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