DVD Review - Instant Family (2018)

Writer-director Sean Anders has made several features. I've seen none of them, but this film is currently his best reviewed. However, over the past five or six years, Anders has made movies that have dealt with unconventional families or people who come together as families due to unconventional or non-traditional ways. Anders' most successful film as director, Daddy's Home (2015) was about a stepfather butting heads with the biological father of his two stepchildren. Anders' most successful film as writer, We're the Millers (2013) was about people who weren't biologically related in any way coming together. This film keeps Anders on that same track. This film is about a couple, past their prime, who consider foster care and adoption. Like with We're the Millers, this film is also about people who aren't biologically related coming together. The premise isn't as ridiculous but still. Like with Daddy's Home, this film has the same butting heads of a stepfather or in this case foster father trying to impress or make a better relationship with his foster children.

Mark Wahlberg has worked with Anders in Daddy's Home and Daddy's Home 2, so it's no wonder why Wahlberg would work with Anders again here again playing a father. This time, his role has been reversed. He's not the biological father, as he was in Daddy's Home. Here, he's a foster father and possible adoptive father. It's a similar rigmarole though about the difficulties of being a parent, but those difficulties are always within a framework of people who live middle to upper-middle class lives.

We're the Millers was about people who were impoverished and living in the margins, but Anders shoots all his movies with the typical gloss and sheen of most Hollywood productions that even the margins feel glamorous somehow. It's the same here. This movie is meant to be about children in need of foster care or adoption because they come from bad to horrible situations. This film never truly convinces me of that. It does convince that these children are run-of-the-mill brats, which doesn't distinguish or flesh them out as individuals but rather just helps to make them punchlines.

Wahlberg stars as Pete Wagner, a contractor or a guy who has his own construction business. He's married to Ellie, played by Rose Byrne (Bridesmaids and Insidious). Ellie seems to work in real estate, and together both of them work to flip houses. What they do is buy cheap or run-down properties. They then renovate those properties and sell them at a profit. The two of them have been doing this for years and it's consumed their lives, so much so that they haven't really considered children. Now, they think it's too late for them to have kids the old-fashioned way. It's never stated how old they are, but Wahlberg and Byrne are in their 40's, which in the modern world isn't too old to have a baby, but they decide to go through foster care and possible adoption, which is good of them.

Octavia Spencer (The Help and Hidden Figures) plays Karen, one of the social workers who helps Pete and Ellie through the foster care process. She also runs a support group for parents seeking to foster children, and the movie keeps going back to what feels like therapy sessions involving the support group, which includes several couples as parents talking about their issues at home with their foster kids. Arguably, these group sessions are the best part of the film, as Karen and her partner facilitate honest discussions about what parents experience. It was also nice to see in those therapy sessions a gay couple who were foster parents. That couple was also an interracial couple named Kit and Michael, played respectively by Hampton Fluker (Shades of Blue) and Randy Havens (Stranger Things).

One criticism is that Anders' film doesn't really do much to put us in the shoes or the heads of the foster children. Pete and Ellie take in three foster children. All three are siblings. All are Latino.
With the exception of the eldest of the children, Lizzy, played by Isabela Moner who worked with Wahlberg before on Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), the movie only makes the siblings one-note punchlines. We get some nuance with Lizzy, but I felt like I never really got enough from the siblings to understand them, particularly in relation to their past trauma with their biological mother.

I understand that this film isn't meant to be Short Term 12 (2013) or even Annie (2014). It's meant more to be a vehicle for Wahlberg and Byrne to show off their comedic chops. Both deliver on that front as parents with good intentions who become exasperated at rowdy and defiant, darn-near unruly children. Eventually, they become over-protective parents. Unfortunately though, this film needed more from the children's perspective or point-of-view. Even a film like Losing Isaiah (1995) manages to give us the child's perspective and the little boy in that film was only 3 or 4 years-old.

Rated PG-13 for language and some drug references.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 58 mins.