Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Like a failed first draft of Blue Jasmine, this middling Woody Allen movie (one also helmed by an Australian actress) splices together the same story told twice, once as a comedy and once as a tragedy, except the comedy is almost entirely laugh-free, the tragedy just a dreary tale of woe, and really, it is just a Sliding Doors movie about wishes made on magic lamps, not a movie about the cruel theatre of life and so it can be hard to remember at times which of the two versions of Melinda's life you are watching they are both so similar.

★★★☆☆

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Daddy's Home 2 (2017)

The 2017 Bad Moms sequel also perpetuated its comedy by introducing an older generation and in doing so, took the focus off what audiences liked in number one - the moms - but Daddy's Home manages to retain the feel by making the granddads replicas of the dads - it's the same joke being played out again in a movie that is most funny when Will Ferrell is doing his Chevy Chase National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation impersonation.

★★★☆☆

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Holmes and Watson (2018)

The ideas behind some of the sketches - because that's what this is, an overlong compilation of Saturday Night Live-style sketch-comedy routines featuring the recurring characters of Will Ferrell's Holmes and John C Reilly's Watson - often make you scoff with incredulity at their very outset - at the very notion - but then the sketch plays out a second longer (and for a great deal more time than that, usually) and your momentary scoff at the idea is quickly replaced with a feeling of dismay and weariness at these characters who in fact have nothing to do with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson at all - and you hope Ferrell and Reilly enjoyed hanging out at least.

★☆☆☆☆

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Drunk Parents (2018)

30 Rock alumni Alec Baldwin and Salma Hayek playing parents desperate to keep the fact they are broke from their college-aged daughter sounds hilarious, but tasteless sequences about paedophilia and molestation and continuity problems so bad you have to assume the movie has been released unfinished mean that the potential of Drunk Parents is, um, wasted.

★☆☆☆☆

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Everything Must Go (2010)

This hardly sounds appealing - an alcoholic loses his job, wife, home and car all in the space of a day and his solution is to hang out and drink excessively on his suburban front lawn where his wife has left all his belongings - but Will Ferrell turns in an understated, heartbreakingly funny performance in the lead, loaning this Raymond Carver's short story adaptation about crisis-ridden working-class America many moments both deeply emotional and laugh-out-loud funny, and even if his journey nears a resolution a touch too quickly to properly address addiction and even if there is a dismaying victim-blaming plot development, this is a surprising bittersweet, funny, sad pleasure.

★★★★☆

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Daddy's Home (2015)

A daggy stepdad (the host of a smooth jazz radio show) and a biological dad (a beefcake handyman) one-up each other in front of the family they share in this 2015 Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg comedy that is funny enough for me to want to see the 2017 sequel.

★★★☆☆

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Get Hard (2015)

A wealthy, white hedge fund manager has just 30 days to ready himself for a 10-year maximum security prison sentence and so turns to a local business owner, a black man, for lessons in male rape, how to perform oral sex to garner prison favour, and shiv making and keistering, and underlying all this penis and anus fun is the not very funny idea that jail culture equals black culture.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Other Guys (2010)

Early on, hot-shot buddy cops, the sort of beefcakes that traditionally tear up the silver screen in action movies, die being stupidly heroic and into their macho places step desk cops Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, a pair of Prius-driving, Little River Band-appreciating, wooden gun-bearing, bickering man-children, so the not very funny running gag here is that as a buddy cop movie, this drags its feet and is no The Nice Guys, no Central Intelligence, no Jump Street.

★☆☆☆☆

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Old School (2003)

Before Bad Neighbours was funny enough to warrant a sequel, there was this similarly themed but dreadfully unfunny Will Ferrell movie about middle-aged men who form a fraternity to avoid eviction - do not expect a sequel.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Land of the Lost (2009)

You get the impression Land of the Lost was made with a computer game spin-off or theme park ride in mind - lots of waterslide and 'temple run' scenes - but despite this blatant commercialism, this adventure comedy is surprisingly funny with Will Ferrell in top form as the worldweary scientist hero who makes time travel - and then a whole lot of cgi dinosaur trouble - possible.

★★★☆☆

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