C

Though it often feels like a ten-minute sketch drawn out to an hour and a half, “Casa di mi padre” has amusing moments, and gives Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal—reunited after “Y Tu Mama Tambien”—the rare opportunity to attempt comedy, even if their efforts don’t always come off. For those reasons alone it merits a look, though it’s hardly the wild-and-crazy sort of stuff star Will Ferrell’s fans might expect.

The movie is essentially a spoof of old Mexican westerns, told in the arch style of a typical telenovela. Ferrell plays Armando Alvarez, the likable but naïve son of big ranch owner Miguel Ernesto (Pedro Armendarez, Jr.). He loves the land, which unfortunately is being overrun by drug-dealers like white-suited Onza (Bernal). But Miguel thinks him rather addled, and prefers his smarter boy Raul (Luna), who returns from the city with beautiful fiancee Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez) in tow. Unfortunately, Raul is a coke-snorting dealer himself, challenging Onza for control of the trade. Simultaneously, Armando and Sonia hit it off after a tense beginning. And a US DEA agent (Nick Offerman) shows up, along with a duplicitous Mexican cop (Manuel Urrego), trying to force Armando help him to nab Raul. It all ends in a comically bloody confrontation in which guns blaze and bodies fall, Tarantino-style.

The best parts of the movie are those that gently but firmly mock its models. Deliberately poor rear-projection shots of people on horses, cheekily phony-looking sets and some calculatedly subpar animatronic work (with the Henson Creature Shop concocting a magical white panther that looks like something stolen from a toy shop) will earn smiles. Gags that play on well past their shelf-life—like an extended opening chuckle Ferrell shares with his two laid-back ranch pals—are worth a chuckle, too.

On the other hand, when the picture tries too hard, it stumbles. All the scenes with the deeply unfunny Offerman fall utterly flat. Though Luna and Bernal are definitely game for the challenge, they’re not natural comedians, and the repetitive material they’ve been handed forces them to mug ferociously, to ever-diminishing returns. A centerpiece butt-centered romantic scene between Ferrell and Rodriguez probably sounded better in theory than it turns out to be in practice. And an intrusion that takes the picture’s penchant for spoofing technical ineptitude to the utmost—a written “apology” for a scene that didn’t come off—is a bust.

And yet despite all weaknesses, you have to at least admire “Casa de mi padre”—and Ferrell—for daring to attempt something different at a time when most American comedies fall into the same raunchy pattern. Of course, that could be a drawback like the one that hobbled some of Steve Martin’s more imaginative pictures. And the presence of subtitles may deter fans who have an aversion to reading under any circumstances.

But what really hobbles the picture is that while it’s not unpleasant, it’s not clever enough to sustain its premise over the long haul. In the final analysis, it’s a “Casa” that’s not built sturdily enough to bear inspection.