I’d like to pay someone, somewhere to conduct an experiment for me. I want to take the audience that I saw Step Brothers with, each and every one of them, and plop them into a theater to watch, say, the Arrested Development movie with me (if and when it comes out). The point of this experiment would be to see if they and I really have that much of a different sense of humor, or if they are just the type of people that laugh at everything.
I’m dying to see the results. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not easily made to laugh at a sitcoms or comedic films. I can find things terribly funny and still not laugh a whole lot; a chuckle here and there, sure, but not the laugh out loud guffaws that I hear so often when I head to the theater. I’m not quite sure why this is: am I just too picky or are they just too easily amused? The ratio of them to me would surely suggest the former.
Keep in mind that it’s not just this film that could fit into this mold. Surely while watching Hot Fuzz or Knocked Up I found this phenomenon to be true as well, and I’d place both of those comedies well above Step Brothers. What I’m really interested in seeing is that, if we could all watch something that indeed does make me crack up (a lot), would they have the same reaction, or would they sit there wondering what the hell I was laughing at most of the time?
In a general sense, Step Brothers is probably not as bad or as good as you’ve heard. I found it to be pretty weak overall, with a handful of inspired moments (the Adam Scott character, the brilliantly out-there operatic finale that had me nearly in tears, the real estate shenanigans) surrounded by literally hundreds of failed/overdone jokes. Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and director Adam McKay can indeed pull a few good laughs out of otherwise unfunny screaming and/or cursing, but just as with Saturday Night Live, they never know when to stop. You can almost feel the movie being made by focus groups: “They liked that bit where Will and John screamed and hit each other – let’s do that 56 more times, so they love it that much more!”
Wrong. The novelty of seeing super straight-man Richard Jenkins drop a few f-bombs is lost almost as quickly as it hits you. The glee of seeing Ferrell and Reilly walk around in a sleepwalking stupor throwing random objects is taken from you before you even have the chance to say “Wake up, motherf*ckers!” And as nice as it was to see Mary Steenburgen given the opportunity to lighten up, the only thing I wanted to tell her was to ease up on the tanning bed/lotion/whatever.
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