Merry De-Cinema-Ber!
I cut my NaNoWriMo so I promised instead I'm going to write a film review every day of December. I'm calling it De-Cinema-Ber because I'm the funniest person you've ever met. Mmmmkay? Cool.
So. Daddy's Home 2 (2017, Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell). Full disclosure, I never saw the first movie. I knew the premise of the co-dadding thing getting messed around because all the grandfathers are showing up and that's about it. Well, I also knew it takes place at Christmas. But I didn't get that from the trailers. I learned that from driving around my home town and seeing all these big white sheets pinned to the ground.
Oh yeah did I mention that? A bunch of it was filmed in my town. I never saw anything other than the trailers and set decorations but I have friends who have pictures of the stars. I can take or leave Mel Gibson (that's a lie. I'd prefer to leave him. He was well cast though. I'll give him that), but Mark Wahlberg being in my town? Amazing. So cool. MW and the Dropkick Murphy's and a snow ball fight on the very same church lawn I regularly cut across? Made me excited enough to subtly text my siblings under my coat in the theater.
Aside from my excitement from seeing landmarks I know and love this movie was mostly not great. I spent a lot of time wanting to punch Mel Gibson's character.
The basic plot is that Brad (Will Ferrell. Does he ever play characters who are grown up and not annoying by the way? He's basically playing Buddy again....) and Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) are trying to come together for their kids' sake. Their dads show up and their plans for a together Christmas go slightly awry. Wedges are driven into already precarious friendships and the kids (and the mom who balances being a background character with actually taking care of the kids surprisingly well) are along for the ride.
In the end everyone winds up together and happy for Christmas because this is a Christmas movie about parenthood and those end with montages of happy family goofy times. Have you never seen a Christmas movie before.
In spite of the mediocrity, a lot of it was very funny and while also forced and predictable the ending was adorable. Some majorly identical parallels to A Bad Moms Christmas right at the end, but cute and fun and funny.
But as I said, the landmarks were why I really liked this movie. And why I can tell you that when you turn a small New England town in May into a ski town at Christmas you pin these white sheets to the ground and it looks kind of dumb in person but impressively snow like on camera. So A+ film set designers. I really didn't think it was gonna look like snow but it did.
Do I recommend this movie? Yeah, sure. It was fun. Dumb but fun.
***Obligatory special shout out to anyone who works at AMC. The characters wind up at a Showcase at one point and that felt very wrong to me and that's why y'all shouldn't be casting me as Darth Vader. I'm too loyal to you guys***
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