Not as offensive as I remember but that doesn't mean its not sitll offputting

“My Father the Hero” is a bad film, but one so incredulously conceived that the idea of watching it again kind of excited me. There was no way it could have been as bad as the premise I remember, and it kinda isn’t, but still there’s something so patently ugly about it that it makes you wonder how it ever got made.


It’s based off a French sex comedy from 1991. Disney’s other arms (Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, ect) had a habit of buying these things up and doing American remakes. “My Father the Hero” has gotta be the weirdest of the bunch, and not just because it somehow got put in the family friendly category of PG rated films.


Gerard Depardieu, who also starred in the French one, plays Andre. He’s a Frenchman trying to correct the absence he’s played in his American-born daughter Nikki’s life over the past several years by taking her to the Bahamas. But Nikki (Katherine Heigl) is no longer his little girl; she’s a temperamental teenager, sneering and scoffing at anything her dad thinks is cool.


Heigl was 14 when the movie was made but that doesn’t stop director Steve Miner from treating her like Michael Bay would a 17 year old. On the pool deck, she bares her ass in a swimsuit and gets oogled by men far older than her; her nymph-like behavior is supposed to be just the starting point of the problems between her and Andre, yet the film never really addresses anything serious between them.


After being found out to be an underage minor Nikki still wants to impress a hot guy on the island. So she concocts a story to get him jealous by claiming that Andre is, in fact, her lover and is just pretending to be her father so as not to be found out as a pedo. Gossip of this goes around the island, leading to many scenes where people look at Andre with venom and he has no idea why.


Those don’t get many big laughs but one scene that does is not surprisingly the only scene I really remember from the first time I watched this. Andre sits down at a piano at a bar’s amateur night and goes into a rousing rendition of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”. It’s inspired and shameless, a great way to make fun of the disconnect between what he thinks and what everyone else thinks of him.


It’s a far better scene than one where the hot guy decides Andre needs to be taught a lesson and so he drags the older man through a waterskiing misadventure that has him dodging everything in the water just to stay alive.


It’s somewhat surprising that the film doesn’t become nearly as offensive as you think it will, but then again, it’s also fairly off-putting just the same. Nikki’s attempts to be taken seriously make her seem all the more depraved as the film goes on, even after almost getting her father killed in the scene mentioned, she seems to keep doubling down. Andre is supposed to be the selfless father figure, and later he proves he actually will do anything for her, despite all reason and logical sense. What makes the film seem all the more weightless is that the hot guy she’s after, and the one her father seems hellbent on helping her get, is a charmless, insecure himbo with no personality worth caring about.


There’s a real eye-roller of an ending and mostly you feel like the film was caught between trying to be family friendly and trying to be ribbald. It’s not as bad as I initially remember it being, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its good either.