Movie reviews
Their commander, Colonel Bullard (Terrence Howard) goes to war on their behalf, and the company — who dub themselves the ‘Red Tails’ after their planes’ decoration — get the chance to prove their worth. Based on a non-fiction book by John B Holway and directed by Anthony Hemingway, Red Tails is a conventional war story in many respects, as a squad of disparate personalities is moulded into a lethal fighting force: one is a maverick, another has addiction issues, another may be too distracted by women, another is too bloodthirsty, etc. If the story and characterisations combine to offer little out of the ordinary, despite the best efforts of Cuba Gooding Jnr and Bryan Cranston, the frequent excursions into the skies provide relief from the dull speechifying on the ground — the dog-fights, as you might expect from a George Lucas-produced movie, are exhilarating. More poignantly, it’s only when they’re engaged in life-or-death battle that the audience fully understands the extent to which these men are forced to fight every day, and that their most vicious enemy isn’t necessarily the fascists who are trying to kill them.
Will Ferrell stars as Armando in Casa de mi Padre (16s), the idiot son of wealthy rancher Miguel Ernesto (Pedro Armendáriz Jnr) and brother to the handsome Raul (Diego Luna). Happiest when communing with the Mexican landscape, Armando is shocked to discover that Raul has turned away from ranching to become a drug dealer, in the process incurring the wrath of criminal kingpin Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal), from whom Raul has stolen the beautiful Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez). Exactly what was Will Ferrell’s agent thinking when he allowed his client to star in a subtitled parody of a Mexican melodrama? The tone of Casa de mi Padre is set very early on, when Ferrell sits on horseback with two ranch-hands watching his cattle, about which he makes a mildly amusing remark. The three men proceed to take it in turns to snicker for about two minutes, as a spoof of the exaggerated tropes of Mexican tele-drama, but therein lies this movie’s central problem: unless you’re sufficiently immersed in the genre to find such prolonged snickering hilarious, you’ll probably consider such faffing about to be a pointless spoof of a genre that is so knowingly ridiculous as to defy satire. Ferrell makes for a winning main character, of course, with his woebegone expressions and straight delivery of Spanish lines adding to the comic appeal of his standard village idiot turn, and he’s surrounded by a very strong cast in Bernal, Luna and Armendáriz. The problem is, the story itself is a five-minute comedy sketch stretched beyond breaking point by the movie’s 90-minute running time, and even actors of the highest calibre come up short when their lines simply aren’t worth speaking out loud.
