When Nancy and Robert marry, it turns out that one of the many things they have in common is that each has a wastrel son, around 40, still unemployed and living at home like a teenager. When the newlyweds combine households, those sons don’t exactly react like the Brady kids. In fact, each defends his turf with the ferocity of a rabid raccoon. It’s harder to imagine a better-suited pair of co-stars than Talladega Nights teammates Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, each a man-child living in a perfect bubble of complete self-delusion.
At first, it’s funny to watch these grown men fight like eight-year-olds, especially when Brennan (Ferrell) makes good on his promise to do something unspeakable to Dale’s (Reilly) drum set. But the plot requires that they set aside their differences in order to find jobs once their exasperated parents finally force them out into the real world, and that’s funny, too. Fortunately, they still haven’t had all the fight beaten out of them.
There’s probably a graduate thesis to be written on all the movie comedies over the last decade that depict our culture as one that indulges men’s refusal to outgrow adolescence (The 40-Year-Old Virgin; Knocked Up; Failure to Launch; I Love You, Man; Role Models; Grown Ups, et al), but Step Brothers is content simply to make scrotum jokes while coming up with a way for Brennan and Dale to approach adulthood on their own terms.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENAuQIAgXIg]