Movie Review Instant Family

Instant Family (2018) 

Directed by Sean Anders 

Written by John Morris, Sean Anders

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Rose Byrne, Isabela Merced, Margo Martindale, Octavia Spencer 

Release Date November 16th, 2018 

Published November 17th, 2018 

I have struggled genuinely with how I feel about the comedy Instant Family starring Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne. This family comedy about a childless couple who decides to become foster parents to three orphan siblings is at times maddeningly, cringe-inducingly hard to watch. Characters occasionally drift into an area of being inhumanly silly. And yet, at the end of the movie, the uplifting message kind of works, to the point where I teared up. 

Did I tear up because the movie is that effective or because Instant Family is based on a true story and is, in many ways, a commercial for a charity of the same name, Instant Family, that works to unite orphaned kids and foster parents? I deeply admire the message of Instant Family and the few human moments that the movie gets right, it gets very right but did the movie cheat? Or is it actually good? 

Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne star in Instant Family as Pete and Ellie. Pete and Ellie own their own house flipping business where he handles the carpentry and she handles the design. Their lives are perfect but they’ve been so busy with business, they’ve neglected the notion of family. With Ellie’s sister Kim (Allyn Rachel) and her husband, Russ (Tom Segura), talking about having kids, it gets Pete and Ellie thinking about it. 

Both Pete and Ellie agree that they don’t want to be old parents, that they are passed the idea of having a baby. They are however, the right age for a 5 to 8 year old kid and thus adoption enters the equation. After Pete looks at a website of kids in foster care he is overwhelmed by the cuteness and the two enroll in an 8 week course to determine their fitness to be parents. Comedian Tig Notaro and Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer are the heads of the adoption agency. 

After several bad comedy scenes of Pete and Ellie and a group of colorful but not too colorful extras failing and succeeding at the basic necessities of being parents, the couples are ready to choose their kids. For Pete and Ellie, they fall for Lizzy (Izabella Moner), a teenager who they feel pity for because no one even talks to kids Lizzy’s age about adoption, she’s 15. Lizzy has more reasons why she’s been hard to place, she has two younger siblings, Juan (Gustavo Quiroz) and Lita (Julianna Gamiz). 

Challenged by the adoption agents, Pete and Ellie decide to take a big swing and agree to become foster parents to all three kids. Now the question becomes, can they actually handle having an instant family? And what about the kids’ mom, a former alcoholic who is just out of prison and in a program in hopes of perhaps getting her kids back? Will the forced drama ever cease and allow the movie to have a genuine moment. 

Instant Family was co-written and directed by Sean Anders whose taste for low brow humor and gag focused nonsense, led to the creation of terrible movies such as That’s My Boy, Sex Drive and Daddy’s Home 1 & 2. I recognize that some people like the Daddy’s Home movies, but I do not and by extension, I really don’t care for Instant Family either. I was wondering throughout why the shrill, awkward, and unfunny gags of Instant Family felt so familiar, then I looked at the director’s resume. 

Anders has a hard time trying to bring a real moment to the screen. He’s so focused on terrible jokes that he loses track of trying to tell actual stories with relatable characters. His taste for broad and crude caricatures sinks what little good there is about Instant Family. Mark Wahlberg, Rose Byrne, and co-stars Margo Martindale, as Wahlberg’s mom, Tig Notaro and Octavia Spencer, appear to be trying to get to the heart of his material but the director and the script keep interrupting with nonsense. 

There is a running gag in Instant Family where the son, Juan, keeps getting hurt. It’s never funny but it just keeps happening where he’s hit in the face with any sporting equipment nearby, he steps in broken glass, he gets a nail in his foot. Why would anyone think this is a funny running gag for a child in a movie? Especially a child in foster care who may or may not have a history of abuse? 

There are occasional moments where the characters are allowed to be real but they are drowned out by moments of shrill hysterics such as a dinner scene that begins with a minor disagreement and ends with the kitchen table on fire and Wahlberg trying to put out the fire with ketchup. That sounds much funnier than it plays in the movie. In the movie it’s a lot of yelling and chaos and zero laughs. 

So why did I cry at the end of Instant Family? Because the film ends on a genuine note with Lizzy realizing that her new parents do really love her and her brother and sister and then the film cuts to a picture of the real family the movie is based on. And then it’s a montage of photos of families that the charity Instant Family has united over the years. You’d have to be some kind of soulless monster not to be moved by these photos. 

Does that mean the movie succeeds? No, it’s definitely cheating, even if it is cheating for a good cause. The movie is mostly bad but it does have its heart in the right place. I don’t recommend it as a movie but I do recommend Instant Family as a charity. It’s nice that Hollywood was kind enough to make a 100 plus minute commercial for Instant Family but that doesn’t mean the movie is worth your time. 

Instead, why don’t you google Instant Family Charity and look at the pictures of newly united families. You will have a far more moving experience without having to have this movie shout shrill gags in your ear for nearly two hours.