Only Human film review

certificate_15

ONLY HUMAN

With its Spanish twist on the Meet the Parents formula, Only Human may have had them rolling in the aisles in Madrid but is unlikely to raise much of a chuckle in Manchester. Quite why this inadequate comedy is being released outside of its native country is anyone's guess. Billed as a 'gloriously irreverent family comedy' the film falls way short of such expectations and soon outstays its modest running time.

The film's selling point lies in its admittedly quirky plot. Leni (Marian Aguilera) is a young Spanish woman who is bringing her fiancé Rafi (Guillermo Toledo) home to meet the family for the first time. The trouble is, Leni's family is Jewish and her husband-to-be is Palestinian. Quite how this isn't realized by anyone in the first five minutes requires a major suspension of disbelief, but allows the scriptwriters to deliver a number of idiosyncratic characters reacting in unlikely ways to most situations they are found in. Whatever comedy there may be is somewhat lost in translation.

Leni's family is an assortment of oddballs, of the kind usually found in a typical farce. An older sister preens herself for another night on the tiles, an overbearing mother wants everything to be alright, a younger brother tries and fails to practice the Orthodox version of his religion while a doddery Granddad recounts tales from the war. And then there's the father - or rather there would be if only Rafi hadn't accidentally sent a pot of soup flying out of the window directly on to his head. Rafi's fish out of water status is even more heightened as he desperately tries to figure out how he could ever be acceptable to this family, while at the same time worrying if his girlfriend's Dad may in fact be an ex-father-in-law.

The film does offer the odd laugh, notably in a scene involving Rafi, the grandfather and the toilet, but for the most part it is juvenile humour which an excitable cast struggle to get to grips with. Matters aren't helped by the fact that the first hour is largely set in the family's cramped apartment, which offers little in the way of visual stimulus. The final sequence - involving bellydancing, a trip to a prostitute and a belated discussion about the Arab-Israeli problem - is both predictable and largely toe-curlingly embarrassing.