Step Brothers

Writer-director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights) and his muse, writer-star Will Ferrell, reteam for another round of absurdist high-wire antics, this time with Ferrell as a 39-year-old mama's boy with dreams of a professional singing career, and Talladega Nights co-star John C. Reilly as his equally layabout step-sibling. Both actors are quite a sight in their '80s-era T-shirts and too-short shorts, jerking off (in Ferrell's case) to a TV exercise infomercial or ruminating (in Reilly's) on what it means to be a man: "We like to shit with the door open, talk about pussy, and go on riverboat gambling trips." It doesn't take long to figure out that Ferrell and Reilly aren't playing characters so much as they are personifying the ids of all those American males who either never learned to put away childish things, or did and wished they hadn't. Ferrell and McKay love to tilt the world on its side and see how it looks—which, in the case of Step Brothers, means not one but two scenes of violent physical confrontation between grown men and a pack of unruly preteen playground bullies. If the thought of that doesn't at least bring a smile to your face, this is definitely not the movie for you. If, on the other hand, you've always secretly wanted to see a woman making industrious use of a urinal, you've come to the right place.