![]() It’s the kind of nightmarish moment that David Lynch probably wishes he’d thought of for Twin Peaks, but it’s played for laughs in Daddy’s Home 2, and it throws a dark shadow over everything else in the movie, making everyone and everything in it seem uncomfortably sinister. John Lithgow plays this scene as though he’s genuinely suffering, no longer able to distinguish fiction from reality, while his tiny arms flail wildly against his control. Case in point: there is a scene where John Lithgow is invited on stage at a comedy improv routine and has a complete mental breakdown while the actors humiliate him by replacing his real hands with “wacky” hands. Wouldn’t it be funny if these characters tried to play-act the Nativity scene, but messed it up because they don’t like each other? Well, yes, if that led to something else funny happening, but you can’t just make your characters miserable and say it’s the joke. The majority of the gags seem to have never got past the idea phase, with the set-up acting as the punchline. Daddy’s Home 2 has about ten solid chuckles in its 100-minute running time, which is not an impressive ratio. It’s easy to forgive a lot of flaws in a comedy as long as it makes you laugh. Their affection for each other would be genuinely charming if the movie didn’t treat it as a carnival sideshow, with every bonding moment intercut with Dusty or Kurt bugging their eyes out as though they’ve never seen dudes like each other before. ![]() Lithgow plays a sensitive man, sweet and naive, with an incredibly positive relationship with his son. Play Joining the fray is Brad’s father, known mostly as “Pop-Pop”, and played by John Lithgow as if he didn’t know he was in a movie with a mean streak. Heck, he even wears boots while bowling, which I presume is only to scuff up the floors and make the manager’s life harder. He teaches a young boy that sexual assault is the only way to get girls to like him, a plot point that the movie ultimately says is good advice. He teaches a young girl to love murdering small animals. He lies to Brad and Dusty to get them to hate each other again. The only pleasure he seems to take is from destroying the morals, friendships and family of every human being around him. That’s because Kurt is essentially Satan. It’s a perfectly good idea that’s completely ruined when Dusty’s father, Kurt, played by Mel Gibson, comes for a visit. But their kids are frustrated at having to constantly bounce back and forth between houses, so Brad and Dusty decide to have their first “Together Christmas”, with both families celebrating in the same place at the same time. When Daddy’s Home 2 begins, Brad and Dusty are best friends and good fathers, sharing the responsibility of caring for each other’s kids along with their criminally underwritten wives, played by Linda Cardellini and Alessandra Ambrosio. ![]() You could set an analogue watch to the plot of the first Daddy’s Home, which ended as it had to, with everybody learning a valuable lesson about why being a jerk is a bad thing… a lesson completely undermined by the rest of these films, which - again - are based on the fundamental premise that reveling in meanness is both funny and appropriate for kids. In the first film, Brad, played by Will Ferrell, was the sensitive stepfather to children whose birth father, Dusty, played by Mark Wahlberg, was more conventionally macho. The Daddy’s Home movies take place in a cruel universe where the basic concept of men having feelings is considered inherently ridiculous, and bullying men into behaving like bullies is considered family-friendly entertainment.
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