My Review of 'Instant Family'

Instant Family looked like a nice family-friendly movie in the trailers. It's still weird to see a muscle-bound Mark Wahlberg playing an everyday dad-type, but it's starting to set in, and I'm getting used to it.

So Instant Family is a little different, and oddly enough, it's based on a true story. It's about a successful childless couple, Pete (played by Mark Wahlberg) and Ellie (played by Rose Byrne). These two have a business of buying broken down homes and flipping them.

They've been doing this for quite some time and are looking for a place for Ellie's sister and brother in law. Ellie and her sister are constantly in competition with one another, and somehow the conversation of children gets brought up.

Pete and Ellie have never thought of having kids for the longest time, and then they just suddenly thought that they should maybe have kids. Ellie then stumbles upon a website about child adoption.

At first, the two are opposed to the idea, but they felt empathy for the stories of the foster children they see on the website.

It's pretty funny because there are some clever quips about how they're not saints and not the type to foster children. I guess they're trying to say that anyone can foster children, not just purely good people.

There are some fun back-and-forth conversations concerning their internal struggles to foster a child or not.

After a motivating speech by one of the foster children, they decide that it is their duty to make a better life for a broken child. Additional funny quips come in about how they didn't want to be stereotyped as having "white savior" complexes. That's an interesting topic that isn't deeply touched upon.

So when they start looking for a foster child to take care of, all of the potential parents have already taken all of the younger children. They soon decide that maybe they should go for an older child even though they're the most troublesome.

They find a teenage girl that they think would work perfectly with them. What they don't realize is that with the teenage girl, they would have to foster her younger brother and younger sister.

That's as deep as the trailer for the movie got, so I won't spoil the rest for you. The movie has tons of charm, and it's fun. There's some clever dialogue in the mix to keep you interested in the characters and engaged in the movie.

I have to say that the son does get into some ridiculous situations, enough that you start thinking, is this really based on a true story? Maybe it's loosely-based, because kids can't really be that clumsy and dumb, can they? It just threw me off so much that at times, I was taken away from the movie.

The other two kids are somewhat believable. I can see all of the characters in this movie being realistic portrayals of people in real life, except for the son.

Overall, I thought it was a fun time from beginning to end. There are a ton of family movies out there, so the competition is tough. Although, if you've seen pretty much everything out there and you need another good family film, this is probably the one to watch. I'll give this movie a 7 out of 10. I don't think it's quite good enough to go to the movies to watch, but it's worth renting or streaming.