Casa de Mi Padre Is a One-Trick Pony

Will Ferrell made a movie in Spanish? Yep. Ferrell's latest flick Casa de Mi Padre is an entirely subtitled affair, sending up low-budget telenovelas. Critics are lukewarm on the results—some appreciate its zaniness, but many liken it to an overlong sketch.

• "As tickled as I was by the slaphappy one-joke silliness of Casa de Mi Padre, I’d be a lot less amused if I’d paid $23 for a pair of tickets," writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. It's "very much a 'Funny or Die' meme that somehow escaped the corral and is roaming free in (some of) the nation’s movie theaters. It’s a solid short film stretched to Silly Putty thinness."

• It's "almost unwatchably awful," grouses Glenn Kenny of MSN Movies. "Applying any amount of thought to it, superficial, or serious, or what have you, is an entirely humiliating, self-abnegating experience." Some people will "get it," and those people will probably be high on weed.
• "Sensitive types might call Casa an 84-minute ethnic joke, but the movie has its moments," writes Rafer Guzmán of Newsday. Yes, it's "a movie with basically one idea," and that one idea "doesn't feel terribly original." But "like Ferrell's tortured Spanish accent, it's worth at least a few chuckles."
• "The folks who dislike Will Ferrell always will," because he's unapologetically weird, "a surrealist prankster of the most confounding type," muses Amy Biancolli of the San Francisco Chronicle. Those people will hate this movie—"almost everything in Casa de Mi Padre is idiotic"—but that's exactly why she liked it. It's "84 minutes of maximum Ferrellian oddness."

(More Will Ferrell stories.)