rated R

Opening with a quote from our own commander in chief, “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream,” is an interesting feint, leading us to believe that the story ahead may have some intellectual underpinnings, some insight into the confused mess that the American family unit has become, maybe even some national consequence. The film then whisks us, with the velocity of a sitcom’s opening credits, through a whirlwind courtship, betrothal and marriage of a pair of 60-something medical professionals (he a widower, she a divorcee) who share the coincidental affliction of middle-aged, umbilically-challenged, parasitic man-children. 

As the couple moves in together, their equally spoiled, dimwitted and radically stunted progeny are obliged to share a room. The brothers are subsequently forced into a primal competition for territory, attention and overall supremacy within their overgrown, two-member “Lord of the Flies” tribe. All potential for informed satire of family politics is swiftly discarded, and put simply, all hell breaks loose.

Surely those responsible for unleashing this concept—director Adam McKay (“Anchorman”), celebrated dough boy Will Ferrell and his recent muse/partner/Siamese twin John C. Reilly, who all worked together on the riotous race car ballad “Talladega Nights”—recognize the great precedent in comedy for watching grown men act like whiney babies (and vice versa—witness their masterpiece, “The Landlord,” on their collective Web site, “FunnyOrDie.com”). Attempting to combine the heartwarming fuzziness of “Big,” the Peter Pan sensibility of “Wayne’s World” and the savage clownery of the Three Stooges seems like an express elevator to high-test hilarity. And it could be. But the fact is, their highly ad-libbed “throw everything at the fan and see what flies” approach is hit or miss at best. Their shotgunned gags rarely connect to or expand on the overall story and veer wildly from uproariously inappropriate slapstick (a completely explicit testicular attack on a forbidden drum set got the whole audience squirming) to desperately rambling improvisation (the boys violently sleepwalking about the house like shambling hurricanes is particularly surreal).

As the developmentally arrested rivalry escalates to a positively Punch & Judy pitch, one begins to wonder if “Step Brothers” may actually be a send up of its own genre. In a current climate so deluged with the Apatow model (Judd Apatow is, naturally, credited as a producer of “Step Brothers”), celebrating the hopeless, jobless slacker as hero, the audience is not invited here to relate in any way to the goons on screen. The extended adolescence on display is ratcheted up to such degrees that the leads are reduced to sulking, simpleminded, overindulged brats with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It says a lot about the dynamics of a film that incites empathy only with the dismayed, fraught and occasionally besieged peripheral characters.

There’s little to be gleaned from “Step Brothers” beyond that which we learned at recess in elementary school. It’s a scattershot, though occasionally raucous exercise in shouldn’ts. These men shouldn’t be acting like this. This movie shouldn’t ever have evolved beyond a series of Internet skits. And we really shouldn’t be laughing so hard.

But they are. It did. And (maybe this says more about us than them) we do.