A New Christmas Classic That’s Actually Funny
Daddy's Home 2 is a great deal fun and explores the different ways parents raise children today.
My family usually starts watching Christmas movies after Thanksgiving, but we got an early start this year as we decorate the house early to bring a little Christmas cheer in the home. (The kids had a nasty bout of influenza.)
Each year we watch many familiar favorites: Rudolph and Frosty. A Christmas Carol (like three versions of it, actually) and A Christmas Story. Jingle All the Way, Christmas With the Kranks, The Santa Clause, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Small One, Christmas Vacation and many more.
A new one, however, was recently added to our list of favorites: Daddy’s Home 2.
Now, the first Daddy’s Home is a solid Christmas movie; but it’s nowhere near as good as the sequel. DH2 is almost the perfect Christmas movie. It has it all: humor, family, great music, great writing, and a wonderful cast.
In DH1, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg teamed up (yet again) to star as two middle-aged fathers—Brad and Dusty—who learn to “co dad” after Brad (Ferrell) marries Sara (Linda Cardellini), the mother of Dusty’s children.
In the sequel they are joined by their fathers, Kurt and Don (Mel Gibson and John Lithgow), as the families (Dusty now has a wife and stepdaughter too) take a Christmas vacation at a beautiful home in the mountains. The dynamics of parenting are hilariously explored, with Ferrell and Lithgow playing the touchy-feely progressive parents while Gibson and Wahlberg play the old school alpha males who possess a touch of hypermasculinity (more than a touch, in Grandma Kurt’s case).
The movie is a great deal fun, and a lot of it surrounds the different ways parents raise children today. Do we give them tough love or do we coddle them? Can we communicate with our kids or do we dodge uncomfortable conversations? Can we forgive the people we love even if they’ve wronged us?
These sound like weighty questions—and they kind of are. But DH2 explores them in a manner that’s mostly just fun (with a bit of sentimentalism mixed in to pull at our heart strings). The bowling scene is one of my favorites in the movie, but I’ll share below my wife’s favorite, which depicts how dads react (or should react) when children fiddle with the thermostat without permission.
If you haven’t watched this movie yet, I recommend giving it a shot (though it wouldn’t hurt to watch DH1 first). If you do, shoot me a note and let me know what you think.
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