Step Brothers

I thought I knew funny, but I was mistaken. Before the blessed light of Step Brothers entered my life, I knew not the sweet comedic splendors of live burial, bunk-bed catastrophe or a minivan family singing "Sweet Child O' Mine" in four-part harmony.

The movie has an anything-for-a-laugh quality, but director/co-writer Adam McKay keeps it grounded by focusing on how four basically decent people might behave in this situation.

The second pairing of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly takes a more organic approach to comedy than Talladega Nights but ultimately, delivers a far more satisfying often gut-splitting movie.

Nobody could mistake Adam McKay for an outstanding film director, but he is a master of the comedy of attrition.

Part of the unexpected treat of Step Brothers is watching Jenkins and Steenburgen sink to such blithely immature levels of rude and crude comedy.

Step Brothers, in sum, adheres to the grand tradition of Apatow-Animal House-American Pie tastelessness. I tried not to laugh -- but gave in to the guilty juvenile pleasures.

Step Brothers is a hard R, for good reason. While it's somewhat sweeter, if you will, than a typical Apatow flick, the ludicrous situations call for equally ludicrous behavior and statements.

Generally succeeds at having its cake and devouring it too, mining juvenile behavior for inane laughs while also, via a coda involving beating the shit out of schoolyard punks, ridiculing stories wherein immaturity must eventually be discarded for adulthood.

Step Brothers is hit-and-miss, but it made me wish that the usual American comedy of how stupid can we get? had this much rage.

Somewhere between unashamed vulgarity and juvenile sweetness lies this surprisingly touching tale about two man-children.

The success of a movie like this has nothing to do with story, though; it's all about the comic bits that are strung together. And the comic bits in Step Brothers are consistently laugh-aloud hilarious.

As Step Brothers plays out, the expected comedy about perma-boys Ferrell and Reilly blends with a borderline horror-movie about the poor parents who are stuck with them.

It's raunchy, rowdy, packed with improvisation, and is firmly committed to buckshot comedy: Blast 50 jokes every five minutes and two or three are likely to hit.

On its own terms, Step Brothers is hilarious. But it's a shame that the filmmakers didn't have more faith in the audience. Why resort to gross-out tactics when your premise is strong enough to allow for a more sophisticated approach?

Step Brothers is stupid. Childish. Moronic. Simple. Juvenile. Silly. Just ridiculous. Man, is it funny.

This is a funny movie, whose comic soul springs entirely from the obvious give-and-take chemistry between its two leads, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.

While the premise of Step Brothers is essentially a one-note joke, the film coasts by on the strength of its actors.

The consistently funny Step Brothers flails with such determination it might make you believe in the redeeming, endearing power of immaturity.

Step Brothers at its best is a smarter Dumb and Dumber. Out of two wacky main characters and a few slightly less addled supporting ones, it conjures laughs by the dozens. The problem is, they come in clumps.

The engine that drives this flick is the chemistry between Mr. Reilly and Mr. Ferrell. The two obviously delight in each other's company, and it feels good and is funny to watch.

Step Brothers beats its comedy into our submission, then keeps slamming the same silly gags past the point of laughter. Any comedy daring to stretch nearly two hours requires more variety.

Step Brothers is crudely funny, which means that sometimes it's crudely hilarious and more often it's just crude.

Step Brothers is stupid, predictable and fairly funny, though even its bigger laughs make you wonder if the whole arrested-adolescent streak in contemporary screen comedy may be running its course.

Credit the makers of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly's silly, crass comedy with carrying the Step Brothers gag as far as they do before backsliding into a finale that lets an absurd conceit turn slack.

A killer concept that has been turned into a sometimes amusing, occasionally hilarious summer laugh fest, Step Brothers should please Will Ferrell fans.

This is ultimately Ferrell and Reilly's show, and although the two actors have played plenty of stooges in the past, they've never done it with quite the same abandon they do here.

Short on script and largely improvised, Step Brothers winds up being like that brief toilet scenario: hit and miss.

The one mistake Step Brothers seems to make -- and it does it quite a bit -- is beating jokes into the ground.

Starting at infantile and regressing hysterically from there, Step Brothers flies on the comic chemistry of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.

Despite a few hilarious supporting players (especially Kathryn Hahn as the miserable wife of Brandon's overachieving brother), Step Brothers runs out of steam well before the closing credits.

Offering little in terms of plot, theme or even high-concept cleverness, the film is simply an extended riff on arrested development -- one that's always obnoxious, often noxious and occasionally very funny.

Step Brothers strives so hard to maintain a crudeness quotient that some of the more overt vulgarity comes across as forced and feeble.

If you're the kind of person who roars at closeups of dog excrement, enjoys a good flatulence joke, and begins every Will Ferrell movie looking forward to the moment he'll drop trou -- well then, this is the movie for you.

The film's greatest virtue is that aside from a short speech at the end about holding on to your childhood dreams, it refuses to be anything more than unabashedly ridiculous.

Director Adam McKay is a veteran of the Judd Apatow school of R-rated gross-out gooniness, but this latest installment in the canon is decidedly underpowered.

The picture feels more like someone's improv sketch show than a full-fledged movie. McKay, who also directed Talladega, lets his stars run wild, which is good for some laughs, but not for creating a legitimately good comedy.

Step Brothers feels like a workshop free-for-all, with Ferrell and his Talladega co-star Reilly trying to outdo each other with adolescent insults and ludicrous chest-thumping that only reveals the characters' colossal ineptitude.

The movie has a nasty little mean streak that makes up for its total goofiness. Ferrell and Reilly aren't lovable dolts, they're lazy assholes -- and trust us when we say that makes a hilarious difference.

For lowdown, cheap and dirty laughs, it's pretty hard to beat Reilly and Ferrell, riffing, trashing and trash-talking each other for 94 mostly mean, sometimes manic minutes.

This is a loud, ugly, foul comedy whose shortcomings extend far into the supporting cast, including reliably excellent character actors like Jenkins and Steenburgen, both coaxed into overplaying what should be straight roles.

Ferrell’s films all have the same rap against them: They seem like painfully elongated versions of the schtick he used to do in fewer than three minutes on Saturday Night Live.

Ferrell's method is to wear out a gag's welcome. He'll crack a joke... then he repeats it ad nauseum until he beats it into the ground.

Step Brothers, is only fairly amusing, with a couple of inspired minor characters and nary a gag or wacky wrestling match that can't wait for DVD. Frankly, the whole thing feels like a coast.

The Will Ferrell comedy engine is running on empty in Step Brothers, a largely plotless exercise in grown men behaving with the juvenile irresponsibility and self-centered obsession of spoiled children.

Once the shock from some of the more noxious jokes wears off, the movie just turns annoying and repetitive.

There are some hearty laughs and even a couple moments of sweetness to Step Brothers. But mostly there’s an irritating stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth quality to this Peter Pan sandwich.

Step Brothers is a one-joke comedy that might have made a decent recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live, digested in five-minute doses.

Yes, Step Brothers is full of rude, lewd, crude humor. And no, I didn't find the majority of it the least bit amusing, let alone bust-a-gut uproarious.

It sounds like a funny premise, and some of the time it is. But the gag runs out of steam before the movie runs out of film, even with gifted comedy stars in the leads.

Asinine but not funny most of the time, Step Brothers is a step backward for co-stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, as well as lowbrow comedy in general.

The prospect of Ferrell and Reilly mouthing off to each other as dueling losers will probably draw in at least some of the Superbad crowd. As a movie experience, it's not awful.

Certifiably funny bits are interspersed with juvenile jokes centering on bathroom habits, flatulence and vomiting. It seems Ferrell and Reilly are having lots of fun, but that's not always communicated to the audience.

Step Brothers has comic fuel to burn, some of it unashamedly non sequitur and stupid-brilliant, but it still feels like a post-Talladega flameout.

Much of Step Brothers has an air of childish naughtiness. With Dale and Brennan at the front, it seems to be a celebration of the decline of American civilization.

Call it an uncredited rip-off of Dumb and Dumber, for its only operating principle is that two developmentally stunted geeks are funnier than one. Do not believe it.

When did comedies get so mean? Step Brothers has a premise that might have produced a good time at the movies, but when I left, I felt a little unclean.

There is no plot, no sense, symmetry or structure to this train wreck. A word processor is inadequate to review it. Nothing short of a flamethrower would do justice to this shoo-in for the Comedy Hall of Infamy.

A movie of unrelenting idiocy featuring boorish behaviour, unrealistic character development and ludicrous plotting.

It's as though Ferrell and co-writer/director Adam McKay conceived an outline for their movie, then decided they would fill out the scenes as if shooting one long series of outtakes reels that spool out over a film's end credits.

Everything about the production is lackluster, from the comic timing to the editing, and even the makeup.

A goofy Ferrell crooning without shame is as much a part of his repertoire as getting naked or slamming himself into walls for a laugh. But laughter isn't the result here; exhaustion is the more precise reaction.