Instant Family (2018)

Instant Family (2018)

7/10

Starring

Mark Wahlberg

Rose Byrne

Direced by Sean Anders

Instant Family promises to be a cool movie, with enough heart warming drama to keep you entertained and if you want to, cry.

The movie did deliver on those promises and I enjoyed practically every moment of the film. It is a feel good movie about how adopting a child or children can turn into a nightmare. The nightmare was not placed for us in a comedic triumph of love and mistakes, but outta nightmare. The couple that took on the role regretted it and tried all they can to change things. Soon they started going at each other, and before long they didn’t know what to do and were just making things worse when they tried to make it better. But in the end it all worked out.

The plot has Pete and Ellie Wagner a married couple who are happy being together with no kids around. They have not concluded on whether they want kids or not, but they have concluded to think about it much later in life.

Their family talk about them and they can take it, until Ellie went online to read about adoption. She got hooked on the wonderful pictures and she with Pete attended a seminar on it. There they were won over by a nice tale of a family who adopted a daughter.

They decided to do it, and they did it big, adopting three kids. It was hell for them. They had to learn to care for children who have been brought up in a certain unconventional way. One of the child is a teenager who just wants to be away from them. She has been the one caring for her brother and sister since their mum is a drug addict and she was no help.

So the Wagner learned in the most heart wrenching way how hard it was to raise a family and also how hard it was for children in the foster care system to break into new homes.

Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne played Pete and Ellie Wagner in this movie. They were the parents who thought adopting will be easy and it is their story the movie is about. The acting put up by this two was just out of this world. On a story that could easily fall into the trash with acting that was just subpar, this movie is well casted from head to toe.

For me Sean Anders the director, producer and co-writer of the movie has done something I appreciate as much as I did his 2013 movie, We’re the Millers.

Here in this movie the plot was taken away from the conventional all good idea of adoption that you would get from Despicable Me kind of movie, to something which is just a dose of reality.

The movie he did in between that and this for example Horrible Bosses 2 and Dumb and Dumber To were not that great. Even the Daddy’s Home series did nothing for me after his 2013 movie We’re the Millers, but this movie is much better and I throw my hat to him.

Here is a good movie to see anytime, you will be guaranteed to feel good afterwards.