MOVIE REVIEW: 'Step Brothers' Makes Me Miss Bill Murray

Will Ferrell makes me miss the old Bill Murray. In his present state, Ferrell’s persistent blank stare and mock gravitas in increasingly tedious studio comedies make for a cheap facsimile of Murray’s wry bewilderment in his endearing early accomplishments. To that end, Ferrell’s latest vehicle, Step Brothers—which pairs him with a less grating John C. Reilly—makes me miss the era of What About Bob? Both movies portray dangerously unstable grown-ups as sources of dysfunction in seemingly wholesome American families, but where Murray’s Bob Wiley develops into an object of striking comic juxtaposition to the stable Marvin family, Ferrell and Reilly are content to bounce off their varying expressions of instability. The rest of the suburban clan is a cardboard illusion.

And that’s the point, sadly. Step Brothers signals another era of American comedy: It’s the sort of thing that will assist future scholars in crafting histories of 21st-century stupidity. The script, penned by Ferrell and director Adam McKay, opens by stealing a priceless line from George W. Bush: “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.” Such an impenetrably confounding outlook drives the plot. 

Minutes later, the title card pops up while Ferrell and Reilly meet cute, forced under the same roof when the characters’ senior parents (Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen) marry and force these two indolent stay-at-home fortysomethings to share a room. So we’re to expect a keen spoof, or at least a clever subversion, of the modern household. Instead, the filmmakers unleash an incessant stream of crass vulgarities, scatological one-liners and a fleeting cameo from Ferrell’s testicles that, in retrospect, might provide the movie with its sole memorable sequence. It’s a snapshot of our cultural regression.

Ferrell/Reilly are surely happy with the idiotic revelry they’ve produced. Good for them! I’m not asking for a kitchen-sink comedy or anything remotely so high minded. But the introductory line of Step Brothers should suggest the depth of its thematic intent. Instead, it’s more like a statement of purpose. The movie embodies the nonsensical logic of our confused lame-duck president. It delivers facile humor that only the fictional protagonists could dream up. With the Bush quote, Step Brothers does get a laugh, but only incidentally—and it’s not even original material.