A quick-sketch routine stretched — amusingly, absurdly, thinly — to feature length, Casa de Mi Padre stars Will Ferrell as Armando Alvarez, the eldest son of a rancher down Mexico, or rather down telenovela, way, where the men are brave, the women beautiful, the villains venal, the passions inflamed, the prose flourished, the sunsets honeyed, and the dangers as numerous as the clichés.
Any Will Ferrell/Adam McKay team-up is worth checking out, and Casa De Mi Padre is no exception. While never hitting the heights as some of their previous efforts, this Spanish language parody by debut director Matt Piedmont is well-made, full of actors and comedians clearly enjoying themselves, and is unlike any American comedy you’ve ever seen.
Unfortunately, it’s just not consistently funny enough to earn itself the mark of a classic, and will probably be remembered for its technical accomplishments and soundtrack rather than its laugh-out-loud moments.
The plot is pretty simple: Armando Alvarez has lived on his father’s ranch his entire life, happy to be tending to the calves and the land with his two amigos Esteban and Manuel. However, he has long been considered the idiot child of the family and held responsible for his mother’s death. Things come to a head when his successful businessman brother Raul returns back home with new bride-to-be Sonia, and things are revealed to be less straightforward than they seem, as the family become embroiled in a drug war with feared criminal the Onza.
The entire film is spoken in Spanish with English subtitles (bar a smidgen of exceptions, mainly the man that is Nick Offerman), and yep, this does include Ron Burgundy himself. Ferrell apparently spent a month with a dialect coach perfecting his Spanish language skills, which sounds legit enough, and immediately mark this film out as something different.
Ditto the loving recreation of frankly shoddy production values often found in the films and TV shows Casa De Mi Padre is aping. You have obviously painted backgrounds, poor digital effects, laughable continuity errors, and bits where the film itself breaks. Its recreation of low budget aesthetics is a source of much of the film’s fun, and comparable to Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse in attention to detail. Similarly, there’s a surprisingly high amount of violence to be seen here, with gunshots and blood spraying everywhere on occasion.
As the primary villain, Gael Garcia Bernal is a preening and effeminate drug lord, surrounded by luxury and used to getting his way (and some of the best scenes involve his love of Canadian Slims). Diego Luna as Raul, meanwhile, is a deranged cross between Pablo Escobar and Tony Montana, and probably by design seems to belong in a totally different movie. As for Ferrell, well, he’s dependable enough – apart from his non-English turn he’s pretty much the same loveable man-child he always plays, but with the added bonus of a really weird and disturbing bum-focused love scene. I can tell you now that Will Ferrell has a pretty hairy butt crack.
However, while it is clear that ex-Saturday Night Live writer Matt Piedmont is a talented man, his debut is definitely lacking – mainly in comedy. Despite a solid start with a great opening title sequence, and epic music throughout, beyond how the film actually looks there’s very little in consistently funny humor, with many jokes wide of the mark and the script incredibly scattershot. There are a few chuckles here and there, but nothing side-splittingly funny or even that memorable
Even with its brief 85-minute running time, Casa de Mi Padre struggles to achieve feature length with a flashback about Armando’s gunned-down mother and incidental scenes with mostly corrupt cops and a DEA agent who speaks Spanish with the broadest of all possible American accents. Hiccups of humor escape from time to time and all the actors ascend to the required over-the-top spirit, but the high times deflate pretty quickly due to the sitting-duck comic targets and the lack of fall-down outrageousness that marks the best Ferrell-Adam McKay outings, notably Anchorman and Talladega Nights.