Father Of The Year (2018) - Movie Review

 

This film’s existence feels like some kind of bad karma. Like someone on high saw how much better Sean Anders was turning out, and decided that the world needed more Daddy’s Home backwash to keep things level. And yet somehow, this film actually makes me miss those flicks.

For a start, as tedious as they were, at least Daddy’s Home had a modicum of a point to it: Turning the friction between birth dad and step-dad into slapstick confrontation. Here, even though there’s quite a bit of stunt work and destroyed scenery to go around, there is really no reason for this fight to be happening at all. It plays on the same dichotomy, pitting the safe suburban dad with the more rugged outsider dad, except they’re both cranked up even higher, with a scientist going up against an actual redneck. All because their grown-ass-adult sons hypothetically wondered who would win in a fight, and because David Spade’s back in Joe Dirt mode, he actually wanted it to happen.

And the weirdest part about that is that it feels like the film itself is ashamed of that plot, so it tries to overstuff it with other shit to stretch it to an hour and a half. Digging a pool for a neighbour so they’ll drop criminal charges, MC Wheezer trying to get a soon-to-be Marine and his father off of his pile of dirty laundry, sex with the elderly as a joke all on its own, shittiest VR ever; yeah, I know I essentially made a random list with The Week Of as well, but when talking about a film that feels this cobbled together, there’s not a whole lot else to comment on.

Well, there’s the fact that this doesn’t even feel like a comedy. It’s so barely-reaching-the-baseline that it feels like we’re being shown slapstick violence as the humour, with nothing in the actual writing or performances to reinforce that. It’s so listless that it makes thinking one of the character is about to be bitten by a leech into the most interesting part of the whole production, if only because we don’t even get closure for whatever the hell was happening in that pond. Then again, with how amazingly garbage the editing for this whole mess is, I doubt it would’ve looked that good anyway.

Even for a Happy Madison production, I would’ve preferred if this was just wholesale offensive, because at least then I’d leave with the impression that they were trying for something. This is just digital clutter, taking up a space on Netflix’s database that could be taken up by something more interesting. Like watching snails fuck.