You’d be forgiven for assuming that Casa Mi Di Padre would be a Mexican mock-drama of a similar style to Anchorman, Will Ferrell’s best-known movie to date. What the audience actually gets, however, is an attempt at spoofing cheaply-made Mexican movies by exploiting their stereotypical traits, including shoddy set design, over-dramatic acting and cheap props, to mention but a few.
Amando Alvarez (Will Ferrell) is a good, sweet natured man whose father, Ernesto (played by the late Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) thinks him a complete idiot. By direct contract, Amando’s brother Raul (Diego Luna) is regarded as the family’s shining star, despite- or perhaps because of- the fact he is a drug dealer. When he brings his stunning fiancé Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez) home with him, she and Amando soon fall for each other. But standing in the way of their happiness together is the problem of family bonds and betrayal, coupled with Raul running into trouble with a Mexican drug-baron Onza (Gael García Bernal). The film follows Amando as he tries to get the girl and save his family from great danger. The film was shot on a budget of around $6 million and is an independent production, only being released initially in selected cinemas around the UK.
The film strongly parodies cheap Latino B-movies and telenovelas that an older generation may remember seeing in all their one-dimensional glory. The editing is purposefully poor, there is plenty of continuity errors- both of which add to the comic effect- and the wonderfully tacky costumes simply reinforce the idea that one of the main jokes in this move is how intentionally bad it is. The set design includes painted backdrops complete with cacti, and cheap, ridiculous props and animatronics; the mountain lion puppet provides one of the funniest parts of the film. Sadly there just aren’t enough of these really amusing, laugh-out-loud moments in this film.
Ferrell displayed true dedication to his role by learning to speak Spanish for the role, which helps to contradict those who might assume the film’s main joke simply lies in Ferrell’s attempts to speak a foreign language. This is something he seems to have intended, as revealed in an interview with The New York Times: “It just hit me that it’d be really funny not to have the joke be that I speak bad Spanish, but that I actually speak as proficient Spanish as I can muster, and everything is played really straight.” As the only cast member for whom Spanish is not his native language, he certainly seems to have done a convincing job, making full use of his Spanish coaching- although Ferrell also added:“I was going to listen to Rosetta Stone, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it onto my computer…It was a disaster.”
Perhaps one of the reasons for the film feeling like an extended sketch at times could lie in director Matt Piedmont and writer Andrew Steele who both worked on Saturday Night Live sketches, often also with Ferrell, throughout the 90’s and early 00’s. This film does seem a bit long at times, even at its relatively short length of 84 minutes, mainly because the jokes are stretched too thinly throughout the running time. They would be better if they were fitted in more closely together in a short film.
Although this movie is by no means dismissible, it might be worth waiting for the DVD rental instead of paying full price in cinemas. Ferrell has certainly taken a risk, particularly when it is compared to some of his massively successful past projects, and like the cheap Latin telenovelas it parodies, Casa Di Mi Padre provides 84 minutes of good fun, but overall it lacks substance and fails to deliver what its trailer promises.