Instant Family 2018
This is a movie I heard about long before it came to theaters. One scene was filmed at the local park where I take my dogs almost every day. They took it over for almost a week, mostly during the day, so it didn’t really impact me that much. I remember they left some Happy Birthday decorations and I think that was the time they gave free popsicles to everyone in the neighborhood to say thank you for taking the park over. But, it is a Mark Wahlberg movie and didn’t get great reviews, so I didn’t see it when it came out (especially knowing that sometimes they film a scene like that and it doesn’t even make it in the movie). However a year or so after it came out on blu-ray, I was lucky to be given a digital copy. It still took me about four months before I watched it.
The movie is about a happily childless married couple who decide to become foster parents. They really feel like they can make a difference, then feel like they are doing great, then reality hits and they hate their lives. And it goes back and forth quite a bit. The three siblings they wind up getting are particularly trying and they often do a particularly bad job of parenting, but it is sort of realistic and a lot of it is played for laughs. At times it feels like a promotion for fostering and while it seems a little like a hard sell, I do think it is nice that they portray foster parents positively for a change and cover some real issues. There is also a great supporting cast to the couple, played by Wahlberg and Rose Byrne, including Octavia Spencer, Tig Notaro, Julie Hagerty, and Joan Cusack. Still, the movie can be clumsy at times and kind of by the numbers. Audiences liked it more than critics and I thought it was funny, sweet, and horrifying enough to give it a B+, and not just because a birthday scene a third of the way through was filmed at my park.
Written: 15 May 2020
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital