Father and Guns

It was Dizzy Dean who said, "It ain't braggin' if you can do it." This is the quandary for our hero in "Father and Guns." His father is a braggart, an egotistical show-off and a self-centered bully. Problem is, he is also a testosterone-laden top cop, an effective undercover agent and a crack shot. Our hero is a pretty good cop in his own right, but "pretty good" isn't good enough for his father, who never misses an opportunity to berate, bully and humiliate him.

When a brutal biker gang kidnaps a fellow Montreal police officer, they go undercover and discover that the gang's defense lawyer and his unhappy son have gone on a woodland bonding retreat in an attempt to fix their dysfunctional relationship. Our warring pair pretends to want to repair their relationship, too, so they're off to the wilderness to try to convince the lawyer to turn state's evidence.

This French-Canadian (English captions) entry to the 2010 Seattle Inter- national Film Festival was a crowd pleaser, because the dialogue and the situations were hilarious. Insult humor has never been my favorite, but I found the father's sarcastic comments, laced with contemptuous barbs to be laugh-out-loud funny. Okay, okay. I should know better, but I did laugh!

Some of the bonding stuff gets a little maudlin, but the main characters are played by actor-comedians, so the lines are delivered flawlessly and we enjoyed an unlikely combination of action, suspense, and farce.