Instant Family Brought On the Feels

Instant Family (2018)

Instant Family is one of those movies that wants you to cry. There are at least a half dozen scenes specifically designed to make the audience feel either sadness or joy to the point of tears. I did not cry, but that is more of an indictment of me than the movie, because I could hear the sobs and wiping of faces behind me in the theater. And after every scene that makes you want to cry, is a scene that tries to make you laugh. Those scenes were much more successful for me, but less successful with the rest of the audience, which makes me very concerned for my own stability, but that is a deeper issue than anything I want to cover in a movie review. What I do want to cover is the fact that for all of the scenes involving children, there were only two times that I was underwhelmed by the child actors, which is very impressive. Wahlberg and Byrne do a great job as two adoptive parents doing their best, but the real star was Isabela Moner. She played the oldest daughter with the rough exterior with the deepest desire for love. She was brilliant and showed a wide range of emotion. I was very surprised, because she was terrible in Transformers: The Last Knight. Actually, everything was terrible in Transformers: The Last Knight, so that is an unfair metric. Besides Moner being a potential star, the biggest takeaways from the movie are the incredible strength and resolve that loving parents have, both biological and especially adoptive. It was a beautiful movie that couldn’t quite decide if it was a comedy or a drama, but it was pretty successful at being both. Overall, Instant Family was a heartfelt movie about the many forms of love and I give it 300,000 of the more than 400,000 children currently in foster care in the U.S. (Sorry for the sobering statistic, but it is true).