Step Brothers Review

The premise is one joke and the film knows it: two men in their forties still living with their parents, forced into a shared bedroom when those parents marry. What makes it a durable comedy rather than a sketch is that Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play it entirely straight, as though arrested development were a medical condition rather than a bit. Nobody in the film ever comments on how strange the situation is, which is the correct choice and the reason the escalation keeps working.

Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen anchor it by behaving like exhausted parents in a drama, and Adam Scott's Derek is the best straight-faced antagonist in a comedy of this era. Visually there is nothing here at all; McKay points the camera at his actors and lets them run, and a great deal of the best material was clearly found on the day rather than written. The plot collapses in the last twenty minutes into a corporate party that exists purely to give the film an ending. What survives is the dialogue, quoted more than almost any comedy since.