Roger Ebert Step — Brothers Updated

: Ebert noted the film's pervasive profanity was "excessive" and lacked the clever "comic strategy" found in other R-rated comedies.

Years later, director Adam McKay revealed that he actually Ebert’s scathing review. McKay argued that Ebert had unintentionally captured the exact feeling the filmmakers wanted to evoke: the frustration of a society dealing with the "infantilization" of American men. According to Decider , McKay felt Ebert wrote the review from the perspective of Richard Jenkins' character, making the critique a meta-tribute to the film’s underlying themes. Contemporary Legacy The feel-bad comedy of the year! movie review - Roger Ebert roger ebert step brothers

In the end, Roger Ebert’s review of Step Brothers is not really about the movie. It is a manifesto about the purpose of criticism. It is an argument that a fart joke, executed with the precision of a Swiss watch and the commitment of a Shakespearean tragedy, is just as worthy of analysis as a Bergman close-up. : Ebert noted the film's pervasive profanity was

In the sprawling, chaotic archive of film criticism, few figures cast a longer shadow than Roger Ebert. For decades, he was the avuncular, thumbs-up oracle from the balcony, a man who could dissect the moral philosophy of Ingmar Bergman in one paragraph and defend the visceral craft of a Schwarzenegger action flick in the next. He possessed a rare gift: the ability to judge a film not for what it wasn't, but for what it intended to be. According to Decider , McKay felt Ebert wrote

He saw what the directors Adam McKay and his producing partner Judd Apatow were doing. They weren't making a movie about what happens to children; they were making a movie about what happens inside a child’s brain, but rendered with the legal and logistical consequences of adult life. When Dale and Brennan destroy a set of job interviewers’ cars with a golf club, it is not just a slapstick gag. It is the logical, violent eruption of a lifetime of suppressed rage against the performative politeness of the working world. Ebert, who had written his own scathing critiques of corporate hypocrisy, recognized the catharsis.

"The movie is a triumph of stupidity, a glorious exercise in stupidity, and it's all the more funny because it's not just stupid, but also clever and resourceful."