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88There is too much funny here for a movie (even though it continues into the closing credits). Step Brothers should be a TV show.
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Not to wax too serious here (since this is, after all, a movie in which two nearly middle-aged men beat each other over the heads with blunt instruments on their front lawn), but ticking away just beneath Step Brothers' freely associative surface is a fairly astute commentary on how we define such abstract concepts as "growing up" and "making something of yourself."
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80So childish it seems to arrive in diapers, and that's not bad; it's good.
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75While Ferrell and Reilly are great together, hatching harebrained schemes that have no basis in reality, part of the unexpected treat of Step Brothers is watching Jenkins and Steenburgen sink to such blithely immature levels of rude and crude comedy.
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75Step 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.
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75Step Brothers is a Judd Apatow production and it's the closest that the Apatow factory has come to spitting out a dumb-and-dumber high-concept comedy.
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70Stupid, crude and hilarious, Step Brothers works by sneaking past our better judgment.
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67Step Brothers at its best is a smarter "Dumb and Dumber."
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63Starting at infantile and regressing hysterically from there, Step Brothers flies on the comic chemistry of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.
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63Stupid, predictable and fairly funny.
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63It's a testament to their performances -- and the spirit of this surprisingly raunchy, decidedly R-rated comedy -- that by the end credits, you've grown to like them a little bit. You just wouldn't want to live with them.
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63The inspired pairing of "Talledega's" Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, two actors smart enough to play dumb and make it work.
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63Take the kids at your peril. Mismarketing aside, Step Brothers is crudely funny, which means that sometimes it's crudely hilarious and more often it's just crude.
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60It's no Anchorman, but it's several steps in the right direction.
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Step Brothers is not a retread so much as a reduction, stripping away the magical pretext of "Elf" and the period trappings of "Anchorman" to get to the heart of the thriving man-boy genre.
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58Reilly is a good foil for Ferrell, but too many of their scenes together have the effect of improv night at the comedy club.
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Essentially a throwaway film.
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50America loves dysfunctional families, but haven't we seen enough middle-aged losers who haven't grown up?
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50A meagre, occasionally funny affair.
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50Simply, the movie is a tale of extremes resulting in a tepid middleground.
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50Are Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay getting tired of their own shtick?
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50The Will Ferrell comedy engine is running on empty in Step Brothers.
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50I don't want to sound like a party pooper (or deny that there is something wickedly funny about seeing these middle-age adolescents beating the crap out of a playground full of little bullying kids) but there's something depressing about the never-ending celebration of eternal adolescence in recent American comedies.
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50The film is funny at times but lapses into the reflexive vulgarity that seems to be the default mechanism of the Apatow machinery.
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50This is a loud, ugly, foul comedy whose shortcomings extends far into the supporting cast.
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40The only thing that can explain middle-aged men acting like 6-year-olds is mental retardation, and there's nothing funny about that. The idea of middle-aged actors playing adolescents isn't much funnier. Put it this way: Such an idea does not make for an inexhaustible source of comedy.
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40Step Brothers has comic fuel to burn, some of it unashamedly non sequitur and stupid-brilliant, but it still feels like a post-"Talladega" flameout.
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40They're losers that only a mother, an entertainment manager or a gang of self-satisfied comedy insiders could love.
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38In Step Brothers, the language is simply showing off by talking dirty. It serves no comic function, and just sort of sits there in the air, making me cringe.
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38Humor is subjective, but this movie made me feel as if I had been subjected to something unpleasant.
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30Ferrell and Reilly get more mileage out of juvenile pouting and bickering than any other performers I can imagine, but that's about as far as this goes.
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20So that's three snickers, not counting the Bush quote, 'cause including that one ain't fair, man.
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0There's a good subject for satire here, the extended adolescence of American kids. But satire presupposes maturity, or at least some perspective. The movie's calculation is that its subjects and audience share the same point of view. The results are truly ghastly.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 49 out of 68
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Mixed: 1 out of 68
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Negative: 18 out of 68
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