Simran Hans 

Ideal Home review – horribly dated

Gay couple Paul Rudd and Steve Coogan are obliged to look after a child in this tiresome camp comedy
  
  

Steve Coogan and Paul Rudd in the ‘wearying’ Ideal Home
Steve Coogan and Paul Rudd in the ‘wearying’ Ideal Home. Photograph: Karen Kuehn/PR

In this wearying, horribly dated comedy, Steve Coogan and Paul Rudd play Erasmus and Paul, a bourgeois gay couple who are forced into parenting roles when Erasmus’s Taco Bell-obsessed, pre-teen grandson, Angel/Bill (Jack Gore), arrives unannounced at their chic mansion in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Rudd is believable as a neurotic TV producer (with hipster beard and glasses), who’s the more responsible of the pair, but Coogan’s narcissistic celebrity chef Erasmus Bumble (“like the gay Butch Cassidy, but not butch”) dials up the character’s campness for cheap laughs, swanning around in raccoon furs and suggesting the kid might enjoy “the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and a nice salad”, rather than ice cream and the arcade. Every joke’s punchline is that these characters are gay, making it difficult to understand who exactly, in 2018, the film hopes to make laugh.

Watch a trailer for Ideal Home.
 

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