Metacritic reviews

Lame Ferrell, through some weird freak of his talent, tends to be the best Ferrell, and despite the film’s general mediocrity in most departments – let us swish briskly over everything about the way it looks – his floundering star turn delivers the goods.

If it all ends in cornball reconciliation, the dumb, fuzzy smile it leaves suggests it’s well earned.

The performers are all skilled enough to make something of this tired material.

Ferrell and Wahlberg are both game, but the material only sporadically lets them let loose and do something truly creative, while poor Cardellini transitions from naggy to unreliable.

It’s by-numbers filmmaking that rarely adds up to anything worth the price of admission.

Directed by Sean Anders, the film goes out of its way to contrive its central masculinity crises in ways that quickly settle for lame, lowest common denominator jokes.

Daddy’s Home raises the occasional smile, but it’s not exactly Wahlberg or Ferrell’s finest hour.

By playing it too safe, Daddy’s Home never finds that comic sweet spot and never rises above, “Well, it’s not awful.”

Its rhythms are sluggish, its jokes predictable and the gags are set up with such thudding deliberateness that even the sight of Ferrell losing control of a motorcycle, careening through the air and crashing straight through his house barely raises an eyebrow.

Daddy’s Home isn’t so much a lump of coal as an empty box.