Father There Is Only One 2 (2020)

Father There Is Only One 2 arrives as the second installment in a collection nobody outside Spain was anxiously awaiting, and it conducts itself accordingly. Santiago Segura directs and stars as Javier, a father whose household is disrupted by a new pregnancy and the arrival of his mother-in-law. Released in July 2020, when theaters were half-shuttered and audiences were wary, it nonetheless became the highest-grossing Spanish release of that year. The achievement says more about the domestic market than the material, but it is an achievement.

Spanish critics divided neatly. HobbyConsolas judged it bad and complained that the sequel repeats the faults of the original while having nothing to say. Fotogramas called it a superior sequel and singled out Loles León, whose comic force carries scenes the script cannot. Both camps are correct. The film runs on set pieces, pratfalls, and the reliable spectacle of a grown man losing an argument with a household.

Which brings us to the ledger. This is a mainstream family comedy built for a broad national audience, and it contains no discernible social program of any kind. No casting decision announces a representational thesis. No character carries a gender-politics argument. Questions of identity, environment, economics, and the body are absent, not suppressed, simply not the subject. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything, and its historical register extends no further than the present tense of a messy living room. The verdict is a clean sweep of zeroes, and we record it without disappointment. A gag machine is entitled to be a gag machine. It is merely not entitled to our classification as anything else.