Worse Than Gigli?

A movie (to me) is really, REALLY bad if I, as well as anyone else in the room can not stand to finish the duration of the film. This is the case with "Chasing Papi", perhaps my vote for one of the worst movies of 2003, or perhaps any other year. I haven't seen Gigli yet (for some reason people aren't returning our copies back to our video store), but I bet I could sit through that longer than this. Everything here is a mess, from the editing to the acting to the soundtrack. At first I thought I was watching a bad sitcom, but it seemed to go nowhere, and it surpassed the 22 minute mark. No, this is an hour and a half of what could be described as comedic torture.

The premise of the film is of that of a sitcom episode. One man has had a relationship with three women in three different parts of the U.S. And guess what? They all decide to come to and meet him! And hilarity ensues! Or does it? What gags that came out really fell flat. About a little after a half hour of this movie, I just got sick of it. It was loud, obnoxiuois and non-senseical.

Let's talk about the technical issues, such as the audio and editing. First, the music tracks of the movie never really seemed to have stopped. It's like the background music was on auto-pilot for quite some time. Not only that, it's loud. The editing of the movie is pretty sloppy. It goes from animated sequences, to the main women, to the man who is having this relationship and so on. It's switching scenes way too quickly.

The script, as you have guessed, has been done before and the dialogue is poorly written. None of the women really have nothing interesting to say, and the dead insults they throw at each other miss the mark.

The acting is equally sub-par. The lead male character has a pretty strong spanish accent, and as a result, a typical english sentence seems complicated coming out of his mouth. I think Arnold Schwarzenegger would have better delivery. As for the female leads, it seems like it's their first time acting. All are a little off key or even ostentatious (especially duing arguments). One of the women (sorry, I don't recall any of the actor's names) seems almost like she's pretending to do a spanish accent, and she looks latino! Did they tell her she wasn't latin enough?

I can understand the intentions of this movie. All the people involved in the project wanted to provide a mainstream film with latnio actors and actresses in the lead. But this film kind of does them a diservice. I've seen a better movie with latino women as leads ("Tortilla Soup" I believe is the title), and never once seemed as pandering as this movie. If the writitng and the editing were done better, the movie would have been better. If there was actually anything comedic in this comedy, it would have been better. But this, to me, just came off as a loud, obnoxious mess.