A young man heads to Los Angeles and sees his estranged father’s life through the eyes of his tenants.
“My Dead Dad” is something of a calling-card picture for its male lead, Pedro Correa, who also co-wrote and co-produced the movie. While the actor has a lengthy filmography, it’s mostly in shorts, including a parody trailer of a nonexistent sequel to “Drive,” directed by Fabio Frey, who also handles that job here.
The premise for this feature is not so antic. Correa plays Lucas, a skateboarding burnout who’s been living in Reno, Nev., since his mom took him out of Los Angeles — and far from his dad — before his teenage years. Now in something like his early twenties, he learns from his mom that Augusto, said dad, has died. Taking a long drag from a cigarette, Lucas asks how his old man died. Mom answers, “Lung cancer”; Lucas mulls this over a second and says, “Nice.”
That’s as close to an honest laugh as the movie earns, but it’s not about laughs, it’s about learning, sort of. Lucas has inherited the Los Angeles apartment building that Augusto owned, and he drives out to size it up and maybe sell it off. There he meets an overenthusiastic uncle (Steven Bauer), a sage building superintendent (Raymond Cruz), a beguiling and artistically inclined young woman (Courtney Dietz) and other underdeveloped characters, none of whom serve much of a function beyond placing themselves before Correa and spouting banalities while he makes doleful eyes at them.
The gear-grinding tedium of the movie’s taking-responsibility scenario is occasionally broken up by not-quite-lyrical sequences of Los Angeles sunsets seen from car windows. “Being an adult sucks,” the building superintendent observes at one point. “My Dead Dad” doesn’t present any compelling counterarguments to that.
My Dead Dad
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
