Film Review: ‘Instant Family’

Commercial Hollywood comedies about the glory and absurdity of modern family life tend to come in two flavors: earnest and wack job.

If Will Ferrell had starred in “Instant Family,” a comedy about an attractive, childless, edging-into-middle-age couple who take in a brood of foster kids who prove to be more trouble than they look, the movie would have been an over-the-top synthetic farce crammed with masochistic dad jokes; even the hugs would have been yocks.

But “Instant Family,” starring Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne as a happily married but vaguely saddened white-bread couple (they barely have a clue as to how much they need children!), who take a trio of Hispanic-American siblings under their untested wings, isn’t a zany obnoxious head conk of a movie.It was directed, as well as co-written, by Sean Anders, who made “Daddy’s Home” and “Daddy’s Home 2” (which were that sort

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