Instant Family

Rating: 3.75/5

Instant Family is definitely overly sappy at times, but manages to pull off the ability to be a likable and heartwarming film.

Pete (Mark Wahlberg) and Ellie (Rose Byrne) are a married couple who have started their own house flipping business. They have been together for years but never made the decision to have kids, that is until Ellie finds a website listing children in the area who are in foster care and in need of a home. Though not fully receptive to the idea at first, Pete falls in love with the idea of being a dad and the two begin the process of becoming foster parents.

In order to become eligible to foster a child, Ellie and Pete must take weeks of classes before even meeting potential children. When their schooling is over, the couple go to a fair where they can meet the kids they may be matched with. Initially apprehensive to foster a teenager, Pete and Ellie are surprised to meet a 15-year old girl named Lizzie (Isabela Moner) that they feel is the child they are meant to foster. The only catch? Lizzie comes with two younger siblings that must go with her. Completely in over their heads, Ellie and Pete agree to foster all three kids, which proves to be much more difficult than they ever could have imagined.

For Instant Family, I am definitely not writing the review I had assumed I would be writing. I expected to be hit in the face with predictable cheese from beginning to end, but was pleasantly surprised to experience a movie with more emotional pull than I had anticipated. Don't get me wrong, it does have its' fair share of overly silly or sentimental moments, but it doesn't go as over the top with it as one would expect from this type of film. What this movie does do, is find a semi-new way to talk about a somewhat forgotten topic. It doesn't make the foster care system seem fully inspirational and glossy, as it isn't afraid to show the serious struggles that can come along with taking on such a major life decision. However, it shows the rewards as well, and for that the film should be commended.

When the characters are trying to adapt to their new lives, it is easy to get lost in the same train of thought Pete and Ellie are stuck in. You are so focused on the stressful situation of raising a teen as it is presenting itself to the new parents, that you completely forget about the other two children, just like Ellie and Pete do. Suddenly, that little light in your brain clicks on and starts to wonder what's going on with the younger kids, just about at the same time as the characters' do. The chaos does seem a bit over choreographed at times, but there are definite moments of spontaneity that keeps the viewer a bit on their toes.

The only major negative that I would have to say towards Instant Family is that I felt the beginning went too fast. You barely get to know the couple before they take in the three foster siblings. Nobody would find this task easy, but had there been a bit more time dedicated to their lives before fostering, it may have made their characters a bit easier to understand and appear to be well rounded. That being said, once the slightly clumsy and fast paced beginning smoothed itself out, the movie continued to improve for the rest of its' duration.

Instant Family is definitely not my favorite film to have been released in recent history, but it definitely caught me by surprise. It's always nice when a movie exceeds your expectations, especially given how rare it is for that to occur.