Movie #76 2020: Instant Family (2018)

I can’t tell you how many times my girlfriend and I browsed Sky Cinema and dismissed this movie as filler fodder.

But then, every movie podcast left, right and centre kept raving about it. So yep, we were peer pressured into it.

Then, on a particularly un-special day, we sat down to watch it.

”I can’t believe we’re actually going to watch this,” my girlfriend sighed.

”No, me neither, but if we don’t then we’ll never know,” I huffed back.

So the stage was set. We were prepared to do a lot of eye rolling and begin our protest that everyone else was wrong and it was just as bad as we assumed it would be.

And yep, you guessed it, we were incorrect yet again.

Instant Family is a great way to feel release from the outside world – perfect for the current COVID-19 climate. If you want some heartwarming family fun, I’d personally recommend Paddington. BUT this is another decent option.

This is the tale of a young(ish) couple who decide that now is the right time to have a baby. Unfortunately, like so many people, they find themselves unable to conceive and turn to adoption instead. Obviously things aren’t that easy, and before you know it the pair of them have three whole children to look after.

The child actors themselves also turn out to be not annoying!!! For me, this is an absolute must when kids are included in a cast. There is nothing worse than children who either can’t act, or aren’t likeable… or both. I personally find that good child actors are a bit of an anomaly, and I completely welcome them.

Rose Byrne and Mark Wahlberg both excel in their roles too playing the anxious new parents, but the real MVPs here are Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro as the heads of the adoption agency. As a duo, they provide some of the best laugh-out-loud moments of the movie, almost providing us with a lesson in comedic timing. Randomly, Joan Cusack also makes a cameo in which she appears in only one scene. I’m not really sure even now why she was there, but I don’t care. I love her so much that she could be in The Teletubbies and I’d give her five stars.

On top of that: THERE’S A DOG. His name is Meatball, and if you scroll back up to the top of this page, you’ll see that he’s a really good boy.

Now I’m not saying that I’ll ever watch Instant Family again, but as a family comedy to pass the time, it was lovely.

Instant Family is available to stream on Sky Go and NowTV in the UK.

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