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DokBrowne [ 7.0 ]
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If nothing else, a round of applause for Will Ferrell for trying something different. Most popular comic actors find their niche and repeat themselves for the rest of their careers. Ferrell is operating with the same deadpan absurdist-idiot style here, but filtering it through the audaciously novel trappings of a foreign language melodrama. You're not gonna see Adam Sandler spend a whole movie speaking another language any time soon.
But is it funny? Well....yeah, not that much. Sometimes it is, but there are long stretches where it hardly even seems to be trying to be funny, practically taking its soap opera storyline at sincere face value. Maybe Ferrell and longtime collaborator Adam McKay were trying to honor the telenovela approach as well as lampoon it, but since all the ingredients in the script they came up with are 100% stereotype (intentionally), whenever the movie isn't clearly joking around, it just feels like a waste of time. We're obviously not gonna buy any of these cliches again, particularly not in this context. I may be reading too much into the movie, but I suspected a few times that perhaps they wanted to stir actual dramatic potency into the ridiculous spoofing. A brave idea, I say, but they don't pull it off, if they were even really trying.
And if they WEREN'T trying, then the movie needed more laughs. There's not nearly enough comic momentum here. It inspires sporadic chuckles and a few solid outbursts but there's too much dead space in-between. The whole movie can still be appreciated for its devotion to the cheap-foreign-B-picture outline. The best gags, in fact, are probably the fake scenery in every shot, staged editing snafus (like a long scrolling apology for why they couldn't afford to show a certain shot), and the recurring use of a horribly animatronic tiger.
I like the concept and everyone's commitment to it enough to say it's a basically good movie. Will Ferrell does a swell job and never panders to an easy racial caricature. In the annals of novelty genre-homaging that has become a growing business within the last decade, this one ranks solidly. Like most genre-homages that tackle their subjects this elaborately, the movie is excellently designed but not engaging enough to endure its full-length runtime. Points for effort
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.8 |
| No. Ratings | : 1 | |
| No. Reviews | : 1 | |
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