Film

It is a point of fact that Will Ferrell is 41. Assessing his emotional age from comedy to comedy is also fairly easy: somewhere between squalling infant and terrible two-year-old. (That’s not a criticism; Ferrell’s tantrums are virtuosic.)

But Step Brothers, a suburban arrested-development fantasia that actually earns tags like anarchic and subtly subversive, is eerily precise to the degree to which it dates Ferrell and his frizzy-haired Talladega Nights costar, John C. Reilly. As Brennan and Dale, two failure-to-launch schlubs still mooching off their single parents, both seem an especially surly 12—old enough to drool over Hustlers in a tree house, young enough to turn weepy at an especially harsh dinnertime insult. We never really learn what dooms them to their lives of rumpus-room romps, Chewbacca masks and bunk beds, but they both seem pretty happy about it, and the spell the film casts is a strange, sweaty one, bordering on psychosis.

That’s until they find themselves related by marriage, and their ultrasupportive parents (Steenburgen and Jenkins, both superb) gently but firmly ask for a little maturity. Step Brothers runs almost dutifully into the quagmires of predictable narrative; actually, it may be the one skit-type project starring a former SNLer that didn’t need a story. Properly, it should cycle endlessly, maddeningly, like a Marx Brothers movie or Bringing Up Baby, from bedroom feud to backyard scrape to garage karaoke-session. The shouty variety of manchild comedy that Ferrell has cribbed from Jerry Lewis divides movie fans intensely. Here’s the one we should put in the time capsule.