Clearly the concept of Will Farrell playing the main character in a melodramatic Mexican telenovela is a hilarious idea worth exploring. But the big question I had going into Casa de mi Padre was whether or not it was a concept that would have the staying power to support an entire feature. If this was a five minute short on Saturday Night Live I would have no trepidation... but Will Farrell trying to speak Spanish for nearly an hour and a half? That could really fall on its face. But, happily, it mostly doesn’t.
Casa de mi Padre lives and dies by its jokes. The story being told is overblown and nonsensical, the characters are all cartoon caricatures that don’t resemble real human beings at all, and no attempt is made at all to create any worthwhile drama; but the jokes are funny enough that you’re able to to forgive the film for being little other than an extended gag. Probably the biggest asset this thoroughly ridiculous farce has is Farrell’s unmatched ability to play even the stupidest thing with the straightest, gravest face; and the fact that he has two accomplished and talented dramatic actors in Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna doing the rest of the heavy lifting accentuates that. The more a satirical film like this winks at its audience, the faster it wears out its welcome, and since none of these guys break and play things as being broad and wacky, the parade of absurdity never becomes boring noise like it does in something like Snakes on a Plane.
What does get a little tiresome is the over crafted shoddiness of the film. From bad looking stunt doubles, to fake looking backdrops, to the fact that the movie uses puppets instead of live animals, everything here is designed to give the impression that this is a super low budget and incompetent movie made in Mexico. That’s funny at first, but after a while the lack of subtlety with which they play the joke runs it into the ground. By the time an action sequence stops and an apology for how bad it came together crawls over the screen instead of the scene itself, the joke had been thoroughly trashed. This one would have been a lot funnier if it looked more authentically dated; think Black Dynamite or even Ti West’s period work in House of the Devil. As is, there are still a lot of laughs, and I could see the sort of crowd that re-watches things like Anchorman incessantly becoming attached to this one over time, so you might as well get in on the ground floor and watch it now.
