You’d have to be a soulless jerk to despise Instant Family, even despite the filmmaker’s worst instincts. This tale of a lovely couple who adopt THREE kids with a deadbeat mother and no kids is means so well its impervious to harsh critical reviews. For me, Instant Family didn’t reach streaming tear levels, but watery eyes were certainly a thing at its better moments.
The three kids here are Lita (Julianna Gamiz), Juan (Gustavo Quiroz) and Lizzy (Isabela Moner), youngest to oldest. Their single mother is struggling with drugs and jail time, so with nowhere to go these kids end up bouncing around the foster system for years of their poor helpless lives. That is until Pete (Mark Wahlberg) and Ellie (Rose Byrne), a couple that fixes broken houses and makes them new, applies that metaphor to adopted children. And wouldn’t ya know it, the metaphor turns out to be a “tad” too simple applied to Lita, Juan and Lizzy? But they figure it out anyways? Yay, happy ending.
I’m not even putting spoiler alert in there. No one’s going to Instant Family anticipating insane plot twists and a mostly sorrowful affair with subtle character work. This is one of those comedies that is appealing to EVERY person who goes to see it, meaning the movie is resorting to tried and tested guttural laughter. Does someone get hit in the head repeatedly with a basketball, falling down and getting a broken nose? It’s essentially the movie version of a “LAUGH” sign to let the audience know it is funny, even though it’s a traumatized 8 year old, but don’t think about that. Ya know what? Let’s have him throw up in a garbage can at SIX FLAGS. Oh you haven’t heard about SIX FLAGS? THE *cough* Product Placement *cough* THE BEST AMUSEMENT PARK OF ALL TIME!?!?!?!? Oh, just so you know, look at the big sign on the screen for what feels like 49 minutes. Don’t like that? That’s ok we’ve got a movie reference we’re gonna casually slip in about The Blind Side? Did you get it? No? Ok, we’ll organically drop the reference every 15 minutes or so it sticks for ya! In fact, don’t think too hard bout this movie y’all! We’ll explain why each scene is important immediately afterwards so you know EXACTLY what we want you to think.
Which is: foster parents are some of the most selfless, amazing people in the world, because they are caring for fragile innocent kids given a rotten piece of bad luck at no fault of their own. And because of that wholesome, lovely message, I’m happy Instant Family exists. The movie, general as it maybe be, does land some very sweet subtle moments from time to time that hit you right in the heart, like poor Lizzy unable to handle Ellie’s sweet gesture of detangling her hair because it’s clear her absentee mother hasn’t done this for her in a long time. Or when something bad almost happens to Juan, and Pete and Ellie are not only ready for the situation, but manage to care for Lizzy and Lita at the same time, in the exact way each one needs to be cared for, without even thinking about it. Or the first mommy or daddy Ellie and Pete earn with their selfless care. We also get a general idea of how hard it will be to raise kids, especially the older ones. After the honeymoon phase, like protection, layers of cynicism and distrust have been built around Lita, Juan and (especially) Lizzy because of the pain they have endured. So they lash out as their form of testing the new parents, to see if they can take it. The constant days of being treated like garbage, public humiliation, and escalating, cutting insults wear down Pete and Ellie, but they do the parental thing…they take it, so the kids don’t need to suffer. I’m glad the movie has them at least consider sending the kids back…and then immediately dismiss the idea. That rings true to most parents I imagine. Instant Family is too squeaky clean to do anything too painfully realistic, but they still show how powerful the highs and lows of the foster system can be.
Watching Instant Family had me grappling with perhaps too many levels of cynicism myself. I was rolling my eyes at the mechanics of the “jokes” from the filmmakers that when I actually started listening to what the story was saying, I could more easily brush them away and just enjoy a wholesome family film about the creation of an unusual but still loving family. I still have my doubts about this adoption agency…if you find out the foster parents invaded a high school, assaulted someone, and left the 2 youngest in a car by themselves, unsupervised, why would you be so willing to give these kids to Pete and Ellie? Nevermind, I was distracted by Lita happy she got a new Teddy Bear…