Daddy's Home 2 (2017)

Sean Anders returns to the domestic battlefield with a second installment that treats the modern American father as a problem to be solved by proximity and shouting. Two reformed co-parents, one stepfather and one biological father, attempt a joint Christmas, and are promptly joined by their own fathers: a macho former astronaut and a relentlessly cheerful oversharer. A rented cabin, an illegally felled tree, a cell tower mistaken for foliage, an improv club, a live nativity, a blizzard. The machinery grinds forward with the enthusiasm of a man who has already been paid.

The film's cultural inventory is thin to the point of austerity. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with a handful of Latino children present as children rather than as statements. The women are assigned to reaction shots and a bonding subplot about behavior they find distasteful. Race never surfaces as a subject. Neither does climate, though snow falls with purpose. There is no economic critique of a luxury resort holiday, no body-acceptance messaging, no neurodivergent interiority, no historical reframing. The comedy runs on slapstick, ice-balls to the face, and the spectacle of grown men weeping in an airport terminal.

Nothing here lectures. The film has no thesis beyond the proposition that fathers, however flawed, should remain in the room. That is a sentiment, not a program. For those of us who catalogue these things, the yield is negligible: a Christmas comedy that wants only to be liked, and mostly fails at that, which is its own kind of honesty. Two hours of goodwill, unburdened by any argument about how anyone ought to live.