“My woman, Senor Lopez, must love the land as much as I do!” Armando declares in “Casa de mi Padre.” Since Armando is played by Will Ferrell, the over-the-top line is played as over-the-top as you would expect. And since “Casa de mi Padre” is a Spanish language comedy, a broad spoof of Mexican melodramas and “telenovelas,” Senor Ferrell performs the line in Spanish. A one-joke comedy has to have a pretty good joke to come off, and Ferrell commits corazon y alma (heart and soul) to this farce. Armando is a “hopeless romantic.” But as his father (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) tells him, “Like your mother, you are not smart … If you were truly smart, you would realize how dumb you are.”
Diego Luna is Raul, the brother “with the brains.” But he is a bad seed, misusing his lady love (Genesis Rodriguez), getting mixed up in the drug trade. The pistol-packing drug lord La Onza (The Ounce), played by Gael Garcia Bernal, is closing in on their land. Ferrell hurls himself into the melodramatic style of acting. The costumes are too colorful and changed too often, the sets too fake. The cast is not just playing the soap opera-cum-spaghetti Western that they’re starring in, they’re playing Mexican TV stars trapped on the set of something that’s beneath them, though they can never let on. Armando and the lovely Sonia (Rodriguez) ride the range, but their horses are wooden. Truthfully, it’s been years since a telenovela has seemed this primitive. But Ferrell & Co. have cooked up an affectionate homage to the genre as it once was. Compadres, in this casa, set in this tierra, the players are all in. Because this is Mexico, and “Mexico is no place for cowards.”
