Step Brothers Made $128 Million. It's Still Two Men Yelling About a Bunk Bed

Step Brothers came out on July 25, 2008. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play Brennan and Dale, two grown men who still live with their parents and are forced to share a bedroom when their parents marry each other. Adam McKay directed, Judd Apatow produced, and Sony spent about $65 million on it. It opened to $30.9 million and made about $128 million worldwide, and in the years since it has become the movie every American man between 30 and 55 can recite, mostly at the wrong moments, mostly at weddings.

I've watched it more than once, which is how I know. That's the first point in my favor: I am not a man who hates fun. I'm a man who has had to sit at a reception table while two groomsmen performed the Prestige Worldwide speech to a bride's grandmother, and I'm here to say the movie is not as good as those groomsmen think it is.

Start with the reviews, which nobody remembers. Rotten Tomatoes has it at about 55 percent. That's not a disaster; it's a coin toss. The critics in 2008 saw a movie with two very funny performances and one joke: grown men behaving like ten-year-olds. That joke is funny for a while. It's funny when they fight, funny when they become best friends, funny when they build bunk beds and the bunk beds collapse. Then the movie keeps going, the way a party keeps going after the host has fallen asleep in the kitchen.

The problem is shape. McKay's best comedies have a world to wreck, a newsroom or a racetrack, full of other ridiculous people. Step Brothers has a house, and the house has two men in it, and the men have one note, played loud. Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins are wonderful as the parents, and the movie mostly asks them to look tired, which they do convincingly, because by the third act so is the audience.

Now, I'll grant what the fans say. Ferrell and Reilly have the kind of chemistry you can't fake, and some of the lines are so stupid they loop back around to genius. Fair enough. But a movie made of quotable lines is like a dinner made of appetizers: you enjoy every bite and still leave hungry, and slightly ashamed, and wondering where all that money went.

And the money went somewhere. Hollywood looked at the $128 million and made a decade of comedies about grown men who refuse to grow up, starring grown men who were paid a great deal not to. Many of those were worse than Step Brothers, which is the strongest defense of Step Brothers anybody has, and not much of one. 'It started a bad trend, but it was the best of the bad trend' is what they'll say about most of us at our funerals.

The truth is that Step Brothers is a great sketch. Ten minutes on Saturday Night Live, two men in pajamas screaming about a drum set, and it would be a classic forever. At 98 minutes, it's a classic only to people who have seen it 14 times and have started to confuse familiarity with quality.

Which is the moral, really. Repeat anything often enough and people will call it a classic. That's how we got Step Brothers, and also most of our elected officials.