BEFORE: Just one more film in my 2019 chain after this one - I'm bringing this year in for a landing right on Christmas Eve tomorrow, with the second of two Christmas-themed movies. I love it when a plan comes together...
Will Ferrell carries over from "Holmes & Watson", and this is his third appearance for the year, which is my cut-off, so he's going to qualify for my year-end countdown, at nearly the last minute. Mel Gibson and John Lithgow also now make the cut, and so does comedian Bill Burr. (Sorry, Mark Wahlberg...)
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Daddy's Home" (Movie #2,484)
THE PLOT: Having finally gotten used to each other's existence, co-Dads Brad and Dusty must now deal with their own intrusive fathers during the holidays.
AFTER: They never say in the film where this story takes place, probably because they want people to feel that it could happen in THEIR state, or even their town. Any place that gets snow in the winter and is a 4 or 5 hour drive from a ski resort would qualify - that's probably the whole upper half of the U.S, plus places like L.A. But a little research on IMDB and Wikipedia tells me that they filmed this in Massachusetts, the ski town was Great Barrington in the Berkshires, and the other parts of the film were shot around Boston, in towns like Framingham, Wellesley, Concord, Quincy and Cambridge. I grew up around there, very close to Framingham and I've been to most of those other towns at one point or another. Mark Wahlberg never lost his Bah-ston accent, so this tracks with the story. The airport seen in the film is probably Logan, if it's not just a set.
This doesn't really impact my enjoyment of the film, but I am headed up that way in just a couple days - we'll drive up to suburban Boston on Christmas Eve, with our annual stop at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. This is our tradition, we've been doing it for at least a decade, though only in the last few years have we clued my parents in on our casino stop. My mother would always be busy doing church stuff on 12/24, so she'd say, "Be sure to eat something on the trip up, when you get here it could be too late to order something..." Don't worry, Mom, I know where there's a solid buffet, and it's within view of some slot machines. With a little luck, this holiday trip will pay for itself - it's happened before. And even if I don't win on the slots, I'll make a killing at the buffet.
But today's film is all about breaking with tradition, in a positive way. In the previous film, Brad and Dusty came to terms with their new-era post-divorce family, setting aside their differences for the sake of their shared kids. Biological Dad Dusty and step-Dad Brad realize, however, that their daughter is still complaining about Christmas, and tells the whole school assembly that Christmas now is better than when she had "no dad", but it's still not as good as it used to be. So the co-dads come up with an idea to have a "Together Christmas", celebrating with everyone in one house so the kids don't have to shuttle back and forth, or see one parent on Christmas Eve, the other on Christmas Day, and so on. (I've got to call NITPICK POINT #1 here, because everyone and his uncle knows that this is how we all placate children of divorced parents, by pointing out that they now get to have TWO Christmases, with double the presents. Did little Megan not get the memo on this point?)
But before Brad and Dusty can even figure out whose house they're going to hold the "Together Christmas" in, and who's going to cook what, they're visited by their fathers Don and Kurt, aka "Pop-Pop" and "El Padre", and this throws a couple of monkey-wrenches into the whole plan. Don and Kurt are like even greater caricatures of the extremes their sons represent, so now we have super-sensitive Don and super-macho Kurt. Don's a retired mail-carrier who kisses his adult son on the lips (umm, yeah...) and Kurt's a former space shuttle astronaut still chasing younger women who thinks kids are coddled these days and still maintains the sexist attitudes of the 1950's. It's basic liberal vs. conservative stuff here, it's not too hard to figure out where these two are on the political spectrum, so really they represent our country's current divided nature. I'd wager one flew in from a blue state and one from a red state, right?
Many of us are about to visit our families for Christmas, or have them visit us, and so we may find ourselves in the same situation. And even for those who share the same political views as our parents, when it comes to raising children the different generations have very different approaches, what was acceptable on or two generations ago may now be frowned upon, like physically disciplining children, for example. For our parents or grandparents it was just the way things were done, and these days if you hit your kid (no matter how badly they're acting up in a restaurant) you'll be publicly vilified, if not arrested. And that's where this film finds most of its humor that works, by pointing out that each generation is still dealing with the mistakes that their fathers made, and trying very hard not to make the same mistakes themselves. (Congratulations, you get to make ALL NEW mistakes!)
Macho Kurt throws his weight around by making a unilateral decision to book a ski-house on AirBnb (more NP's about this to follow below) and then he attempts to sow contempt between Dusty and Brad, and in the end it's not that hard to do. Kurt also believes in hunting for sport (forcing the family to re-consider its stand on gun control) and in letting kids fail at sports, because failure builds character. He's not wrong about the sports thing, but just too many comedy films lately have poked fun at the whole "Everyone gets a participation trophy!" mentality, and many of us are already on the same page here, thinking that we're raising a generation of kids who aren't permitted to fail, so their egos are artificially inflated, and they never build up the mental scar tissue that enables them to deal with failure. Treating kids harshly is wrong, but P.C. helicopter parents have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction - why can't our culture find a balance point here?
The very different men bond together, though, when they find that one of the kids in the house is "fiddling with the thermostat", which I can attest is nearly a capital crime in a New England household. And "fiddling" is defined as any change made to the setting preferred by the dominant male figure in the family - even if we bumped the thermostat accidentally, my dad would freak out. The only possible worse offense during the winter was holding the door open for too long and "letting all the heat out". What's very out of character here is that Dusty, the more "macho" of the two male leads, seems to be the one afraid to discipline his child, perhaps because she's his step-daughter, can counter any argument with "You're not my REAL dad..." and her real dad is the size of a professional wrestler. Still, even with all that, this seems out of character for Dusty - when that step-daughter clearly NEEDS some discipline in this situation - she believes that she is more important than the other people in the house, who are sweating profusely while trying to sleep!
Plus, NITPICK POINT #2, a kid from Generation Y likes to sleep with the windows open and the room temperature cranked up to 80 degrees? I thought they were all about saving the planet, and that's not how you do that. If anything, a modern pre-teen would be the one yelling at her parents about how their generation killed Mother Earth, and her generation's going to be the one that has to save it. We've greated a generation of little Greta Thunbergs, and hopefully they can get rid of plastic straws and maybe build some solar panels, because the current adults aren't getting it done. Even the ones who aren't really into conservation at least pretend to be, just so they can feel superior to their parents, so I couldn't find this obnoxious energy-wasting kid believable at all. Instead of bargaining with her over the temperature, he should have pulled rank, or at least tried the argument about saving the planet.
Then the next day, the men are back at each other's throats - but wait, they were just all bonding over their shared fixation with maintaining a nightly household room temperature of 65 degrees! Why didn't they bond over this, and realize that as dads, they all have so much in common that unites them and the matters that separate them are inconsequential by comparison? I mean, come on, we all know that's where this is going to end up, but it really needs to be a gradual progression, you just can't have them seesawing back and forth, working together one day and tearing each other apart the next, right? If anything's going to kill a screenplay, it's inconsistency.
Now, let's get back to that ski house - I say that NITPICK POINT #3 concerns decorating a house you rent on AirBnb - you wouldn't spend hundreds of dollars on lights and decorations, even if it is Christmas. Also, guests would NOT be allowed on their host's roof to install them anyway, I'm pretty sure that's a violation of the AirBnb rules. And most likely, even if the cabin is large enough, they would NOT be allowed to cut down a Christmas tree in the woods and bring it inside. Who's going to clean up all the pine needles and the sap that leaks out of it? Again, violation of the AirBnb terms of service, big time, unless the host specifically allows this, which I doubt. There was some mention of how it might be against the rules in those woods to cut down a tree because it was a federal nature preserve, but this was just laughed off - I'd be more worried about getting that negative review on AirBnb for being bad guests in someone's HOME.
So the whole sight gag about the snow-blower getting caught in the Christmas lights - it never should have even COME to that, because nobody in their right minds would have strung up lights on a home that they're only renting for a few days. (According to the "goofs" section of IMDB, this snowblower accident is impossible with modern snowblowers, anyway.). And WHERE was the host when all this was taking place? Sorry, it doesn't work, try again.
Then there are at least a dozen threads and jokes that never go anywhere, they're just left dangling. The voice-controlled shower, Karen's shoplifting habit, the woman Kurt picks up at the improv show - none of these things get properly followed up on, they go exactly nowhere, so WHY are they even there? The family volunteering as a human nativity scene is almost another dead-end, except it leads to a snow-brawl where everyone's dressed as a Biblical figure. Hmm, a little better, only it feels just as pointless as everything else. The kids get drunk on eggnog, and STILL nobody disciplines them? I'm starting to think that maybe the old ways are better, these kids are WAY out of control, only nobody can see it.
A Christmas Day blizzard forces everyone leaving town to turn back and the only thing to do in town is to go to the movies (when they SHOULD go back to the house they rented and clean up that giant Christmas tree...) and this probably pissed off all the Jewish people in town who spend every Christmas day catching a movie, then eating Chinese food. Oh, right, there are no Jewish people in town, because this is a Christmas movie. But they have a big Band-Aid sing-along in the theater lobby, and the management hands out free giant candy bars as snacks. As if.
Everyone becomes fast friends by the end, and polar opposites liberal Don (Pop-Pop) and conservative Kurt (El Padre) even jet off to Vegas together. They're like a new version of "The Odd Couple" or something - they'll be fine as long as they don't talk about politics. Then Brad's mom arrives with HIS new step-dad, who happens to be a celebrity. It's all well and good, I suppose, except my final NITPICK POINT is they chose a celebrity who's married in real life, so it's impossible for me to believe that he could be suddenly married to Brad's mom. They couldn't think of a celebrity who's single?
Also starring Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Mel Gibson (last seen in "The Beaver"), John Lithgow (last seen in "Beatriz at Dinner"), Linda Cardellini (last seen in "Welcome to Me"), John Cena (last seen in "Daddy's Home"), Alessandra Ambrosio (ditto), Scarlett Estevez (ditto), Owen Vaccaro (last seen in "Mother's Day"), Didi Costine (last seen in "The Hollars"), Daniel DiMaggio with cameos from Bill Burr (last seen in "Gilbert"), Chesley Sullenberger (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story") and the voice of Liam Neeson (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker")
RATING: 4 out of 10 wild turkeys
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