For the record, it's English. I was born in Tilbury, Essex, made temporarily 
American citizen?"
The new comedy from Will Ferrell, Casa de mi Padre, is a genuine oddity.
Told in the style of a telenovela – a kind of Spanish TV soap opera that reaches a conclusion after a long run – Casa de mi Padre is a comic Mexican western presented entirely in Spanish with English subtitles. Ferrell, who did not speak Spanish, had one month in which to learn his lines. Like many foreign speaking actors of the past who learnt English phonetically for their
The plot revolves around Armando (Ferrell) who works his father’s ranch, Armando’s seemingly successful brother Raul (Diego Luna) and Raul’s new fiancée, the stunning Sonia (Génesis Rodríguez). When Armando and Sonia first meet and Armando expresses his desire that the woman in his life, whoever she may eventually be, must love the land as he does, you can sense the flame of desire come alive within Sonia; let the love triangle commence. Other complications will follow, including lust among the lovers, drugs among the bad guys, and the murder of the innocent. If anything, at least the story remains true to its telenovela origins.
The film begins amusingly enough with fake backdrops, fake horses, and a celluloid print that pops and crackles as if played through the projector a few too many times, until you realize that this is how it’s going to be for the whole film. The gimmick didn’t help Tarantino’s Grindhouse a few year’s ago, and it works even less with Casa.
Characters talk in an overly dramatic fashion as they face the camera rather than each other, and when the violence comes it’s presented in the slow motion style of a 70’s exploitation thriller, a drive-in ‘B’ movie that took it’s cue from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, not for artisitic reasons but because violent gunplay, flaying bodies and exploding blood squids look better when shown in slo-mo.
Had the script for Casa de mi Padre contained real laughs instead of moments of mild amusment it might have worked. You wait for a moment akin to the flatulent cowboys eating baked beans sitting around the campfire in Blazing Saddles but it never comes. The film desperately needs at least three or four belly laughs. Instead the whole thing appears to float by, bouyed by nothing other than its own Spanish language gimmick. The end result is an extended SNL Digital Short that should have lasted five minutes but goes on for eighty-four.
Casa de mi Padre is a one joke film, only it’s the kind of joke that wasn’t really worth telling in the first place.
