Classic Intel: Casa De Mi Padre - Online Review

'Is that gag so funny that it really needs two outings? I would suggest that it is so old that it does not even merit the one.'

That the funniest thing in Casa De Mi Padre, Will Ferrell's Spanish-language Western, is a letter that shows up at the end purporting to be from the '2nd Camera Assistant', speaks volumes. For that to happen, to a film starring Ferrell and purporting to be 'small' but actually featuring Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal and Nick Offerman, it means that something must have gone very wrong indeed.

In this case it would appear that the thing that went wrong was the script, which makes the slightly problematical error of including a grand total of zero jokes. You suspect you're on dodgy ground when the director, Matt Piedmont, rolls out the 'people laughing for too long at their own not funny joke' gag pretty early doors, a suspicion confirmed when he rolls it out again later in the film. Is that gag so funny that it really needs two outings? I would suggest that it is so old that it does not even merit the one.

Perhaps, given that this 'Comedy' has no comedy, there might yet have been some enjoyment to garner from Piedmont's pastiche of similar low budget Westerns. Cheap painted sets show up frequently and there's a 'comedy' animal to 'laugh' at later but, like so many films which attempt similar, it doesn't really feel like Piedmont is trying. Is it really that hard to cobble together a few wonky sets? Isn't there something a bit more core missing here, a decision to shoot on grainy film or something? It's a pretty lazy attempt to produce an imitation and as ever, the fact that awful production values are awful whether intentional or not, also holds true.

Of the stuff that is interesting here, the final battle provides some middling entertainment and the wedding scene is pretty good, if mainly for two shots of two different people smoking and the hint that someone, somewhere did, for just a minute, pay attention to some of the small details.

That attention though is seriously lacking elsewhere, rendering Casa Di Me Padre largely a joyless experience and a thankless task.

Casa De Mi Padre was available to stream on Lovefilm.

By Sam Turner. Sam is editor of Film Intel, and can usually be found behind a keyboard with a cup of tea. He likes entertaining films and dislikes the other kind. He's on Google+, Twitter and several places even he doesn't yet know about.