Casa de Mi Padre review

Will Ferrell is, like all great comedians, a true chameleon. To go from SNL to movies like Old School and then turn around and do a movie like Stranger than Fiction takes true talent. It's an old idiom, but it remains true enough to be said again that, "drama is easy, comedy is hard". If you can make your living cracking people up in various forms of comedy you're practically already an award-winning actor even IF you've never been nominated.

Casa de Mi Padre is a truly remarkable experiment. One that succeeds, BTDUBS.

I guess at this point in his career, Ferrell doesn't really have any reason to fear failure so why not try something insane and risky? IMO, making an R-rated, Spanish-speaking film with English subtitles and having Will Ferrell as the title star is the epitome' of risk-taking.

Of course there isn't a ridiculously bloated budget here to be concerned with but still...I was slightly surprised no one cried racism or took offense to what Ferrell and company were doing (not that they should - people are just so damn touchy these days).

Regardless, the risks paid off. Casa de Mi Padre is a fun movie. It revels in the ludicrous and takes great pains to dive into the absurdity that it is.

However, I wouldn't go into this movie expecting to laugh out loud constantly. It's an odd hybrid that is almost a high-brow comedy while reveling in the stupidity of the subject matter. Even when I wasn't laughing, I found myself enjoying the movie and smiling at the mockery that was created. Almost everything is played straight, but the world that these characters find themselves in is such a bizarre, overly-dramatic, 70's style Spanish soap-opera romance that the ridiculousness of it all is what has you in stitches. You have to jump on board that ship as soon as it starts sailing. If you can't, you'll be lost without a paddle. Straight up.

Can't believe I just used 'straight up' in a sentence...

My only criticism (and a minor one at that) is that while the flick knows what it is and is doing everything it does with absolute purpose, I felt that the craziness could have been pushed EVEN further. Everything is so tongue-in-cheek, why not go balls-to-the-walls and really make the set-ups, the story, and the dialogue even MORE INSANE?

For me, that's the only "problem" with this movie. It just could have been pushed a little bit more into the world of ridiculous.


7 / 10