Will Ferrell isn't yet as irrelevant as Mike "The Love Guru" Myers, but it's telling that when Seth Rogen makes a brief cameo appearance in "Step Brothers," the "Knocked Up" actor seems to be doing the much more famous Ferrell a favor. (He certainly isn't doing himself any good -- the scene, which leads to a protracted discussion of flatulence, is awful, and Rogen looks embarrassed.)

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Columbia Pictures

Brennan (Will Ferrell, right) and Dale (John C. Reilly) are immature middle-aged "boys" forced to live together when their parents marry in "Step Brothers."

Step Brothers

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Rated R for crude and sexual content, and pervasive language

Length: 95 minutes

Released: July 25, 2008 Nationwide

Score: 2.5

Cast: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins, Adam Scott

Director: Adam McKay
Producer: Judd Apatow, Jimmy Miller
Writer: Will Ferrell, Adam McKay
Genre: Comedy
Distributor: Columbia Pictures

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"Step Brothers" knocks "Drillbit Taylor" from its perch as the worst film yet from the once infallible Apatow Productions comedy assembly line ("Knocked Up," "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"). Its failure is a surprise, because the premise would seem hard to screw up: Perennial man-child Ferrell and "serious" actor-turned-Pete Puma human stand-in John C. Reilly star as Brennan and Dale, a pair of jobless, still-living-at-home 40-year-olds (actually, Brennan is "only" 39) whose self-centered, arrested-adolescent existences are threatened when they're forced to move in together after Reilly's dad (Richard Jenkins) marries Ferrell's mom (Mary Steenburgen).

The brothers evolve from fierce competitors to best friends, united by their hatred for Brennan's snobby, name-dropping, successful brother (a brilliant Adam Scott). They also become musical collaborators, because Ferrell's Brennan, according to Dale, has a voice "like a combination of Fergie and Jesus." They create a rap video, "Boats and Ho's," that seems to have been left over from a Pauly Shore movie. That's right: a rap video parody, in 2008, in a project from people who consider themselves in the top tier of comedy filmmakers. (The movie was directed by frequent Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay, from an underdeveloped script credited to McKay and Ferrell.)

Earlier Apatow productions made a virtue of their adult frankness, but this is a movie that could have benefited from the restrictions of a PG-13 rating. When building bunk beds, donning Chewbacca masks, kowtowing to 10-year-old playground bullies and otherwise acting like grotesque kids, Ferrell and Reilly are funny. But the frequent profanity and body-part humor is jarring and forced. Of course, many non-risque scenes are just as weak. Ferrell and Reilly's destructive "sleepwalking" scenes are desperate in their laugh-free zaniness. The movie's humor is utterly random; many of the more memorable gags -- the appearance of "Uptown Girl," a cover band that plays only 1980s Billy Joel music, for instance -- are divorced from the plot, and could be dropped into almost any comedy.

Incidentally, every dictionary will tell you that the title of this film should be "Stepbrothers." This means that "Step Brothers" continues the Apatow tradition of misspelled and mispunctuated film titles. (Before being corrected to "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" for its DVD release, that 2005 film was referred to in its ad art as "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," which literally meant that the movie was about a virgin who was only a year old, which would not be particularly unusual.) Maybe the filmmakers should spend less time on porn sites and more time at wordcentral.com.

-- John Beifuss, 529-2394