Casa de Mi Padre

2012 | 84 minutes | Rated R

Will Ferrell and his longtime producer Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights) go south of the border for this mock spaghetti western, which is spoken in Spanish and subtitled. The movie reunites Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal of Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) as rival drug dealers, which might seem cute if you can forget the real-life horrors of the Mexican drug trade. Director Matt Piedmont and writer Andrew Steele, veterans of Ferrell and McKay's "Funny or Die" web site, lack the cinematic chops to mount a big-screen tribute to the genre, but there are some amusing bits: a couple of slo-mo, Peckinpah-style shootouts; a ludicrously fake scene of animals clashing in the mountains; an assortment of production flubs (the same rear-projection shot in two entirely different car scenes). If the project was intended to enlarge the comedian's audience, it may be a wash: for every prospective Ferrell fan who can’t understand English, there must be an existing one who can't understand subtitles. By J.R. Jones

Director: Matt Piedmont
Producer: D. Lumpkin, Billy Rovzar, Emilio Barroso, Will Ferrell and Jessica Elbaum
Cast: Will Ferrell, Gael García Bernal, Nick Offerman, Diego Luna, Efren Ramirez, Genesis Rodriguez, Adrian Martinez, Pedro Armendáriz Jr., Alejandro Patino, John Lorenz and Mariann Gavelo