Implied Valor in 'Daddy's Home'

Is Dusty Mayron, the character played by Mark Wahlberg in Daddy's Home (out now on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD), a military veteran? While he never quite comes right out and says it, Dusty sure implies that he his when he meets the 101st Airborne vet boss of his rival Brad Taggart (Will Ferrell). While Dusty has been out in the world either serving in special ops or working as a military contractor (he's vague about it), his wife divorced him and remarried Brad, a smooth jazz radio programmer.

Dusty's home to win back his family and stable, boring Brad's forced to deal with a threat from a true, badass alpha male. (Does this setup make Brad Jody? If Dusty's for real and not guilty of Implied Valor, then you could make a pretty good case that he is.)

Wahlberg and Ferrell previously made The Other Guys, yet another one of those Will Ferrell movies that gets funnier the more times you watch it. In that one, the guys are incompetent NYPD officers who crack a massive Wall Street swindle. That movie's end credits feature an animated explanation of financial fraud, sort of a warmup for director Adam McKay's Oscar-nominated The Big Short.

Ferrell has made most of his best movies with McKay (see also: Talladega Nights, Anchorman, Step Brothers) and Daddy's Home is missing some of the anarchic edge that makes those collaborations so funny. To be fair, Daddy's Home director Sean Anders made That's My Boy, the best and edgiest Adam Sandler movie of the 21st century.

This is not one of those movies. Even though it's a PG-13, it's a family-friendly PG-13 that aims to be heartwarming.

As part of the home video release, Paramount has animated two of the dueling bedtime stories the dads tell as part of their efforts to impress the kids. Check them out below.

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