Daddy's Home 2 (2017) * *

Directed by:  Sean Anders

Starring:  Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell, Mel Gibson, John Lithgow, Linda Cardellini, John Cena

It is faint praise, but Daddy's Home 2 is slightly better than the original, which saw a stepfather and biological father battling it out over who is the more appropriate daddy in their children's lives.    The sequel adds each guy's respective fathers to the mix, which bumps the laugh quotient up a little bit, but falls back on slapstick gags which are perhaps more elaborate, but not funny nonetheless.    The movie doesn't have enough faith in its premise to wring out laughs out of truth or human nature, so let's have an out-of-control snow blower wreak havoc on the Christmas decorations.    Or one guy pelted by not one, but three snowballs.    Slapstick doesn't equal laughs as much as desperation.

As Daddy's Home 2 opens, Dusty (Wahlberg) and Brad (Ferrell) seem to have the co-parenting thing down pretty pat.    Christmas is approaching, however, and the kids dread having to spend Christmas at both houses, so they all plan to spend Christmas together.    Yay.   But throwing a monkey wrench into the happy plans is the arrival of Kurt (Gibson), Dusty's largely absent, macho dad who mocks Dusty's and Brad's partnership at every turn.    Further complicating matters is the arrival of Don (Lithgow), the overly sweet and sensitive father of Brad, who greets his son with a mouth to mouth kiss.   Kurt assesses the situation and determines to drive a wedge between Brad and Dusty through a series of machinations too laborious to be recapped here.

The whole crew, including the kids stuck in the middle and Brad's and Dusty's spouses all trek to a winter cabin rented by Dusty and the hijinks ensue.    The plot doesn't contain any surprises except what object will be used to pelt someone in the face.    Dusty and Brad are soon at each other's throats and the arrival of the biological father of Dusty's stepchild (Cena) seems like overkill in a movie already teeming with too many characters and subplots.

The movie's laughs belong to Gibson and Lithgow, two self-contained actors and characters who find a way to rub off on each other anyway.    We wish everyone else would get out of the way so we can watch them do their thing, but the movie cuts back to the unconvincing rekindling of the feud between Dusty and Brad, while everyone else scrambles for their fleeting moments in the sun.   All is resolved on Christmas Day at a movie theater crippled by a power outage in which the characters engage in a puzzling version of Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?", which plays a part in one of Dusty's childhood regrets.    If you really, really want to know how, go see Daddy's Home 2.    I could tell you and save the price of admission, which also may save you from a slog of forced slapstick.    If you like that sort of thing, however, you will get mad at me and we wouldn't want that.  
Maybe Daddy's Home 3 will follow Don and Kurt around and leave everyone else home.   Now that would be an interesting comedy to see.