Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are teenagers. It doesn’t have to make sense. They might just as easily be playing tigers or mountain streams. The important thing is that you run with it.
They are, within the crazy world of Step Brothers, aged 39 and 40 respectively, but if they’d stuck with that idea this might be a sensitive, depressing indie film. It’s not.
As the movie opens, Mr. Ferrell is still living with his divorced mother, Nancy (Mary Steenburgen), and Mr. Reilly has never left the home of his widower father, Robert (Richard Jenkins). In keeping with the high concept title, Nancy and Robert meet, fall in love, get married and amalgamate their overgrown offspring into one big disgruntled family unit. The reluctant step brothers respond to their predicament by battering one another with tricycles, baseball bats, anything to hand. Temper tantrums ensue.
Between Ferrell, Reilly and trusted Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay, his director and co-writer on the similarly outlandish Anchorman and Talladega Nights, everything is turned up to eleven. This is not just another man-child arrested development comedy. This is the alpha, the omega and the total desecration of the form.
Can grown men hitting each other over the head with shovels for 90 minutes really be so damned clever? Do you even need to ask?