Why? Because it's a comedy that needs you to laugh at jokes! I didn’t know child adoption was so fucking funny. The other parents proceed to crack jokes and talk trash about the kids they adopted. If that isn’t bad enough, Ellie and Pete attend this group adoption support group for weekly check-ins on the progress of settling the kids. They’re supposed to be the ones who make sure the adoption process runs smoothly and that the kids are in a nice and stable home. They’re introduced as such, but then they start to crack jokes on the kids they have under file. Their roles are supposed to be the foster care guidance counselors of the adoption process for Ellie and Pete and the many other adoptees. Then, you have the child adoption agency which is run by Tig Notaro and Octavia Spencer. That was part of the charm of films such as “Cheaper By the Dozen”, but to have your leads take this foster care process as a joke and being so geared to quit when situations get rough, then you’re given nothing to root for. It’s one thing to have characters who try their best even though they aren’t fully equipped to be parents. Even if they are the Hispanic “Bebe’s Kids”, they often banter over giving up and wanting to send the kids back. They claim that they want to be parents so bad, yet they put little effort when raising them. Besides being triggered over seeing a bunch of faces on a foster site, never for a moment do you see them genuinely motivated to have any kids. It’s not for the heartfelt desire to have kids, but to show their relatives and friends that they can. What’s this couple’s motivation to keep these kids during the instant parenthood process? To prove their own family wrong and show that they are equipped enough to provide. The exact moment you fully hate them is when they attend a Foster fair where they offend a girl just for sitting on her own and a group of teenagers who “use drugs, masturbate, and watch people play video games on YouTube!” If you don’t agree with something that they don’t like, then they’ll offend you and make it seem like they’re innocent when you call them assholes. They are shallow, loud, selfish, and judgemental to an unbearable degree. Your lead characters Pete (Mark Wahlberg) and Ellie (Rose Byrne) have to be one of the worst married couples I’ve seen in a movie in a long ass time. Words cannot express how terrible every single person in this movie is, primarily our two central characters. But when you apply shallowness towards child adoption, then you have to be the most inept person on the planet. But its dullest stretches are buoyed by a murderers' row of riotous actresses and comedians: Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro as odd-couple social workers mouse-voiced Julie Hagerty and boisterous Margo Martindale as grandmothers and when it seems like it can’t possibly get any better, the great Joan Cusack makes a surprise third-act appearance.When it comes to comedy, nobody is fond of shallow characters. “Instant Family” can sometimes feel like a primer instead of a piece of entertainment, taking the audience through the myriad bureaucratic steps of foster parenting, from the application process to the final hearing in family court. RELATED: 'Instant Family' director inspired by his own life It’s more than they bargained for, but Pete and Ellie have the love to spare, and so they dive into the deep end. Abandonment issues run deep in the kids, who were taken from their biological mother because of drug addiction, and an ethnic divide adds an extra layer of complexity. That baggage includes two younger siblings: emotional and easily bruised Juan (Gustavo Quiroz) and cutie-pie baby sister Lita (Julianna Gamiz), whose tantrums would put the fear of God in Linda Blair. They are immediately taken with Lizzy (Isabela Moner), a headstrong teenager (is there any other kind?) who comes with equal parts baggage and heart. Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne play Pete and Ellie, house flippers who take their can-do renovation gusto into the foster care system. The result is too well-meaning and sincere to truly dislike, but too frictionless and manufactured to do right by the complicated scenario. It sounds like shaky ground on which to expand a family, but it’s the real-life scenario that inspired “Instant Family.” Director Sean Anders (“Daddy’s Home”) is himself an adoptive father to three siblings out of foster care, and he drew from his own experiences to co-write a comedy about the joys and terrors of foster parenting. Wouldn’t it be funny, they say, if we just adopted a 5-year-old? Then it will be like we got a head start! A childless, middle-age couple suddenly wants kids, but they also don’t want to be the “old” parents who have to shuffle to their kid’s high school graduation ceremony with a walker.
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