Daddy’s Home review: these father figures just don’t add up

There is not, on paper, a thing wrong with Daddy's Home. As we saw in The Other Guys, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg form a lovely complementary partnership: Will is soft and flexible; Wahlberg is confident and energised. They go together like sour cream and chilli. The high concept sounds all the right comedy klaxons. Ferrell plays a decent, gentle-hearted stepfather who, as hard as he tries, can never quite win the love of his partner's kids. One day he hears that the children's birth father is coming to stay. He turns out to be the leather-jacketed, brash, manipulative Wahlberg. A furious competition for affection begins.

As well as having a cute, workable comic conceit, Daddy's Home is actually about something important. Too many mothers will recognise the deadbeat dad who turns up once a year with a giant teddy and harvests affection rarely put the way of the step-parent who cleans up poop every bloody evening.

Never mind that. We can't expect Sean Anders, the director of Sex Drive, to suddenly turn into Susanne Bier. But it's surely not asking too much for a few more imaginative variations on the comic theme. If you were assembling a film festival of movies whose best gags were all in the trailer, then you could do worse than open with Daddy's Home. Will drives a motorbike through a wall. Mark finishes off the family treehouse in spectacular fashion. Will flings a basketball into a cheerleader's face.

Employing classic Hollywood hypocrisy, the film asks us to find the reprobate cool and the reliable Joe foolish, before - in an inevitable last-act swivel - concluding that we should abandon our inner Wahlberg and embrace conformity. (There is an explicit argument for compromise, but nobody with half a brain will be fooled.)

Oh well. Approach the film without watching the trailer and you will pass the time amiably enough. But it’s not what we were asking for and we really weren’t asking for very much.