Whether an oddball independent movie or a mainstream movie which stays in the viewers' comfort zone, the common factor between all good films is that they have characters who are sympathetic or relatable on some level. Daddy's Home has none. The two main characters are both very unlikable and the script is incredibly mean-spirited. You keep waiting for the Will Ferrel character to get beyond his weaknesses or the Mark Wahlberg character to stop being so mean but it never happens. The scene in which an attempt is made to turn a clinically dead person waiting for emergency to come into a joke is incredibly low, for example. Although you instinctively know you are supposed to root for the Will Ferrel character, the lack of positive development or growth in him makes you not want to care. As a result of the awful script, you find yourself not rooting for anyone.

The film does find some heart towards the very end in a dance-off scene but, by then, it's so late in the proceedings that the film is impossible to salvage. Although I understand that Hollywood is a business, filmmaking is still an art and I therefore find it hard to understand how soulless movies like this get written and greenlit by large studios and find actors of such quality as Messrs Ferrel and Wahlberg to work in them. Surely, someone somewhere must have enough pride in his craft to rethink such a disaster before it is released, no?