Casa de mi Padre Review
I’m pretty sure they had a point, but I can’t figure out what the hell it was.
Casa de mi Padre is a study in “sort ofs”. It’s sort of funny. It’s sort of dumb. It’s sort of a spoof on a movie that sort of started off as a spoof. The cast sort of plays the roles seriously, while the entire movie is sort of silly. It’s sort of like watching a SNL 15 minute skit stretched out to 84 minutes, and it’s sort of like watching 84 minutes of Mexican drama on Telemundo.
One thing this movie is definitely not sort of is well paced. The film drags for comedic effect, because slow is always funny. At least one person in the row in front of me fell asleep and started snoring, and I was seriously wishing I could turn on my phone to check my email. That being said, most of the audience was laughing, but it was that special kind of desperate laughter one gets when they believe something should be funnier than it really is. Kind of like when you pay good money for a movie touted as a comedy that seems to have all the elements of funny, but doesn’t quite add up to really gut busting and you end up forcing yourself to laugh in order to not feel like you just got ripped off.
The one running gag was purposeful editing and continuity errors. Bad animatronic animals, painted on backdrops, horrible stunt man doubles, and repeated driving footage resound. It all would have been really campy and funny if they had purposefully shot it with poor quality camera effects, but the camera work was fairly flawless, making the dopey purposeful film errors seem really forced and fake. Honestly, if they had ramped the film effects back to the level of say, Six String Samurai, then it would have truly played out as a great spoof and tribute to Mexican drama. Instead it was like some jackass hipster wearing clothing from the local thrift store in spite of making six figures in order to seem more “real”.
The story. Will Ferrell (Zoolander, Stranger than Fiction, Anchorman, Talladega Nights. Zoolander image courtesy of the Movie T-Shirt category) plays Armando, son of a Mexican rancher and generally fairly dopey guy. His father has some ill defined problems but thinks Armando is to dumb to help. Armando’s brother Raul (Diego Luna-the Terminal, Y Tu Mamá También, Milk) comes home with his gorgeous fiance Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez-Prisonera, Man on a Ledge, Doña Bárbara. By the way, I said in my Man on a Ledge review that Genesis is my dream woman, and this movie only reinforced it). Armando finds out that Raul is involved in the drug trade and is here to take of the territory of another drug lord, Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal-Bad Education, the Science of Sleep, the Motorcycle Diaries). Armando confronts Raul and is uninvited from the wedding by his father. At the wedding the script gets hijacked by Scarface and the father is killed. Armando is shot, and while dying is visited by his spirit animal and has a dream vision that looks like the bullets were all laced with peyote. At that point it devolves into a goofy shooter that was equal parts Scarface, Police Academy, and the Three Stooges.
Anyway, the stars. There were portions of this film that were really funny. Two stars. I don’t know if Will Ferrell speaks Spanish or not, but he managed to make the role seem believable and passionate. One star. Genesis Rodriguez will always get a star from me. One star. I am also a fan of Will Ferrell from his Zoolander and Elf days. One star. Total: five stars.
The black holes. Pacing like watching a zombie horde cross a rocky slope. One black hole. Taking 20 minutes of funny and stretching it into 84. One black hole. Failing to deliver a point. One black hole. Total: three black holes.
So a total of two stars. Given the relatively low star and black hole count this movie sits right in the middle of mediocre. I actually left the theater kind of regretting spending the money on time, where even a really bad movie I often feel like I got something out of it. Worth seeing? If you are a Will Ferrell fan or watch a lot of Telemundo sure. Nothing on here needs to be seen on a big screen. In fact give the bad set backdrops and props it might even look better on a small screen. Netflix it IMO. Date movie? Meh. Like everything else in this film I am right in the middle on this. Maybe if there is nothing else to see.
Thanks for reading. Shortish review but that is what always happens when I get a movie that sits in the middle. Nothing to review tomorrow, but I have a couple things I want to write about so I will come up with something. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu or email me questions or suggestions at [email protected]. Any comments on this review itself feel free to post here. Talk to you soon.
Dave
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