Daddy's Home 2

After their initial feud, Brad (Will Ferrell) and Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) have managed to put their differences aside and become not just great co-dads but even - dare I say it? - best friends. While Brad is now married to Dusty’s ex Sara (Linda Cardellini) and step dad to Dylan (Owen Vaccaro) and Megan (Scarlett Estevez), Dusty is managing a new family structure too, helping out with his kids as well as being a husband to Karen (Alessandra Ambrosio) and step father to Adrianna (Didi Costine).

Dusty and Brad decide that it would be a great idea if they could get the whole family together for Christmas, but when their own dads Don and Kurt (John Lithgow and Mel Gibson) arrive to spend the holidays with them, the delicate balance of the household starts to crumble.

Irreverent, brash and silly – those are just a few words to describe the comedic quality of Daddy’s Home 2 and if you don’t like your comedy as such, you best stay away. There’s a lot of reliance on slapstick humour and inappropriate behaviour for laughs which is essentially a continuation and furtherance of its predecessor, so again, if the first Daddy’s Home wasn’t your cup of tea, you won’t enjoy this one.

So why the three star rating, you might ask? And indeed it’s a higher rating than I gave to the other holiday comedy sequel offering we had of late (I refer of course to A Bad Moms Christmas, which is truly, honestly, woefully bad). My reason for this is I found myself laughing along in spite of myself. Was I crazy, or is this actually a comically confident script with clever casting to boot? My inclination is towards the latter.

The movie marks Ferrell and Wahlberg’s third movie together (having also played a duo of detectives in The Other Guys) and they share great chemistry on the screen. They're one of those mismatched pairs that just works, and then throwing Lithgow and Gibson into the mix was a move that really paid off. Gibson is clearly having a ball with the ensemble – although the misogynist jokes he makes feel a bit too real and discomforting at times – while Lithgow’s Don is just a delight throughout. The alternate pairings between the four leads lead to several laugh-out-loud moments while the chaos of the extended family all bunched together (especially when joined later by John Cena, who plays Adrianna's dad) also proves entertaining.

Look, it’s not going to be a Christmas classic, and in spite of a PG cert, I’d be pushed to deem it ‘family friendly’, but sure more of the jokes land than don’t, the four lads are great craic together, and you can’t fault its resolve to spread that holiday cheer.