Rating: 3.5 Pulses

Rated R

Step Brothers is the latest comedy from Adam McKay, director of Anchorman and Talladega Nights, and, like those films, Step Brothers revels in letting its fully-grown stars act like newly pubescent teens, only this time they’re R-rated.

The R-rating is well deserved. Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (Reilly) play two crass, self-entitled brats whose parents fall in lust at first sight and decide to get married based on a common bond of having man-boys for sons.

What ensues is not so much a plot as mere devices for Brennan and Dale’s love-hate hijinks. The hit-or-miss dick and fart jokes can be a little exhausting, and the shear childishness of these two men can conjure the disturbing image of them in diapers sucking away at pacifiers in an oversized crib. Instead you get the consolation of seeing Ferrell’s sack.

But it’s not all bollocks. There are a few comic gems, the kind that only Ferrell and Reilly can deliver in that perfect tone of confusion, suppressed rage, and surreal nonsense: “This house is a fucking prison.” “On Planet Bullshit.” “In the galaxy of This Sucks Camel Dicks.”

If this back-and-forth free-form comedy doesn’t suit your fancy, then you must be a Derek type. Played with smarmy douchebaggery by Adam Scott, Derek, Brennan’s younger bro, is the pointy-faced embodiment of the American Dream, the slimy antithesis to the slacking step brothers, and a model citizen to Dale’s reasonably frustrated father.

Of course the crux of the “plot” development lies in Brennan and Dale finally learning to grow up, which means becoming painfully normal and no fun at all. What this Judd Apatow production lacks in heart it makes up for in a bit of social commentary that seems to be a rebuttal to all those cynical critics tired of films about affable slackers.

After seeing Ferrell and Reilly act so ridiculous for an hour, once these actors, both hugely successful solely for acting like children, finally do shape up and go through the same rigmarole that you and I do everyday, the latter starts to seem the more silly and soul-sucking lifestyle.

By the end, the movie condemns the norm in favor of just being yourself, whether you are a 40-year-old man with a crossbow wearing a pirate hat and a Chewbacca mask, or a retiring doctor with dreams of sailing around the world (and being a T-rex). According to Step Brothers, the real American Dream is to follow your own.