Daddy's Home (2015)

"Daddy's Home" arrives as a Christmas release from 2015, a studio comedy in which Will Ferrell plays a mild-mannered radio executive and Mark Wahlberg plays the biological father who returns to reclaim his children. It grossed $242 million worldwide, becoming Ferrell's highest-grossing live-action film, a figure that says much about the appetites of the holiday audience and nothing about the film's cultural ambitions. Those ambitions are close to nil, and the film seems at peace with the arrangement.

What social consciousness exists here is accidental. The cast is white to a degree that reads less as a statement than a default setting, with Hannibal Buress and a few supporting players supplying incidental variety. Buress's handyman Griff becomes the pivot for a running gag in which Dusty maneuvers Brad into appearing racist after Griff is fired, a humiliation beat that treats racial discomfort as a punchline and never as a subject. Linda Cardellini's Sara occupies the thankless position of a prize contested between two men, her own preferences largely unconsulted until the third act requires a reconciliation. The comic engine runs on the contrast between Wahlberg's musculature and Ferrell's softness, plus a recurring joke about Brad's sterility, and it finds no reason to interrogate either.

There is no environmental concern, no economic critique, no engagement with neurodivergence, and no historical revisionism, because there is no history. The film wants only to amuse, and it pursues that goal with a shrug. A sequel followed in 2017. Sofia Coppola has named it a favorite. We are left to classify it plainly: a broad, harmless, commercially efficient comedy that preaches nothing, means nothing, and would be faintly insulted by any suggestion that it should.