The story of Instant Family marks a more personal turn for writer/director Sean Anders who has been doing either gross-out raunchy comedies like Sex Drive and That's My Boy or those slightly more family-friendly Daddy's Home movies up to this point. Taking a cue from his own experience adopting a trio of children through the foster care program (though the kids in the film are apparently drastically different from his own), this gives Instant Family a more pleasing tone than prior Anders movies that frequently felt they were trying to be too hard to be crude and abrasive. However, given the personal place that this story originated from, it's surprising and disappointing just how generic much of Instant Family feels.
Jokes about kids liking cardboard boxes more than expensive gifts or Mom not being able to get a moment alone even when she's in the bathroom feel like they came straight out of a 1998 Baby Blues comic strip while the youngest daughter, Lita, is yet another example of a precocious youngster whose only purpose is to say cutesy one-liners. The fact that Lita and Juan barely factor into the movie all that much (much of the drama comes from Pete and Ellie trying to get through to the abrasive Lizzy) means climactic emotional beats about the five lead characters being a family lose some of their intended impact. The fact that said beats didn't work on me of all people is really something, if you can't get a softy like me to at least a shed a tear or two in your poignant family movie finale, something must be going wrong!
Part of the reason these big emotional scenes don't work as well as they do in Instant Family can also be chalked up to Mark Wahlberg's work in the lead role. Wahlberg always carries a sense of detachment in his line deliveries no matter the circumstances, when he's giving a heart-to-heart talk to Lizzy, his dialogue delivery makes it feels like he's putting on an act. Last year's vastly superior heartfelt family movie Wonder cleverly found a way to use Owen Wilson's typical chill-bro on-screen persona to its advantage, I wish Instant Family could have found a similar way to make Mark Wahlberg's (admittedly more limited in range) style of acting work for its own lead character.
The fact that Wahlberg is playing off of a solid lead turn from Rose Byrne, who is way more convincing in this role and actually scores some amusing laughs throughout, doesn't help him of course. The rest of the cast is mostly delivering work on par with Byrne's lead performance, with the likes of Octavia Spencer, Tig Notaro and Character Actress Margo Martindale all turning in fine work in their assorted roles while the direction of Sean Anders, while still showing room for improvement, has taken a noticeable step up from the first Daddy's Home movie, particularly in how it doesn't have the visual feel of a multi-camera CBS sitcom from ten years ago nor does it have the gratingly limited color palette of his 2014 lackluster directorial effort Horrible Bosses 2.
If only Anders and regular screenwriting co-collaborator John Morris had made similarly notable strides in the writing department as the script (along with a miscast Mark Wahlberg) is what really drags things down on Instant Family. The tone is amiable, most of the cast is fine and the intentions are noble, but the jokes and pathos just don't work as well as they should while the story is very much in need of some abbreviation, running at 119 minutes, this overlong movie could definitely stand to lose 10 or so minutes at least. Instant Family may stand above prior Sean Anders directorial effort and a number of other modern live-action family comedies, but on its own merits, it's still an underwhelming comedy that feels like it's giving a potentially fresh story too stale of an execution.
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