A spoof of Mexican Westerns and Latin American telenovelas, Casa de mi padre is a truly bizarre entry in Will Ferrell’s filmography - a very broad, Spanish-language comedy that sends up a pair of genres few Anglophone viewers will have encountered. Ferrell, speaking deliberately stilted Spanish, plays the idiot son of a Mexican rancher, who gets caught up in a war with a fearsome drug lord (Gael Garcia Bernal) after his shady younger brother (Diego Luna) brings home his gorgeous new fiancée-with-a-past (Genesis Rodriguez).
Everything is over the top and self-consciously clunky. Continuity gaffes, jarring jump cuts, dodgy back projection, lurching zooms and hammy acting: writer Andrew Steele and director Matt Piedmont, both Saturday Night Live alumni, provide them all. But you do wonder why they and Ferrell bothered. This is a one-joke movie where few will get the joke and those who do probably won’t find it that funny.
On general release from Friday 8th June.
