Step Brothers (2008)

Step Brothers arrives from 2008 with the confidence of a film that has no interest in being about anything. Adam McKay points his camera at two grown men who share a bunk bed, and the joke is simply that they exist. There is no thesis tucked beneath the drum set, no argument about how we ought to live. The picture wants to make you laugh at a pair of prosthetic testicles and then go home.

On the matter of representation, the cast is a wall of pale faces interrupted briefly by Ken Jeong, who appears to serve as a punchline and then vanishes. Nobody involved seems to have considered that this might be a subject worth addressing. Race never enters the room. Neither does queerness, nor any feminist reading of the material, which is built on crude adolescent gags and an affair subplot that treats Kathryn Hahn's character as a joke about boredom. The bodies on screen are deployed for disgust, not celebration. The film's relationship to physicality is one long bit about how gross a middle-aged man can be, and it commits to that fully.

The corporate world of Derek's helicopter leasing takes a light ribbing, largely because smug professionalism makes a useful foil for men who refuse to grow up, but the film holds no economic grudge and wants no part of one. A therapy subplot exists, though the filmmakers cut the storyline that would have given the characters a diagnosable condition, which tells you how much they cared to say about the mind. History does not appear. The climate does not appear. All that remains is ninety minutes of improvisation, long takes, and a Billy Joel cover band, delivered without a single sermon. Step Brothers preaches nothing. In 2008 that read as laziness to some critics and as freedom to others. Time has been kinder to the second reading.