With Father’s Day this weekend, there’s no better time to reflect on all the potential perils of fatherhood. (Our recent A.V. To Z on bad dads in fiction might be a good place to start.) Being a dad isn’t easy, and being a stepdad is even harder. And when you’re a stepdad forced to compete with a motorcycle-driving manly man who’s come back into your stepkids’ life to make you look like a chump, you’re bound to make some comically poor decisions.
That’s the premise of Daddy’s Home, the new movie reuniting The Other Guys stars Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as a pair of dueling dads who find themselves in an escalating war for filial affection. Ferrell—operating in his dogged nice guy mode—plays Brad, who’s slowly making in-roads with his wife’s kids. Those efforts are disrupted when her bad boy ex-husband Dusty—Wahlberg, who the movie seems to think looks a lot sexier and more badass with slicked-back hair than reality would suggest—barges back into their lives.
From there, things progress about as you’d expect them to, with the two dads engaging in increasingly ludicrous competitions for the kids’ love, and Brad getting increasingly Will Ferrell-y as the situation gets out of hand. The trailer posits Dusty as the one with the consistent upper hand, so there aren’t any scenes of Wahlberg descending into the high-pitched apoplexy that made his performance in The Other Guys so fun, but it’s probably only a matter of time before he breaks it out. Daddy’s Home opens on Christmas of this year.