Let’s see if we can unravel the convoluted lineage of the turgid Mexican melodrama “A Father’s Miracle.”
The story of a mentally-disabled man’s unjust imprisonment for an accident that wasn’t his fault, a man locked-up in a police state but sustained by his undying love for his little girl and her plucky determination to get him out, came to life in Korea under the title “Miracle in Cell 7.”
The 2013 Korean weeper was directed and co-written by Lee Hwan-kung. That led to a 2019 Philippine remake, a 2022 Indonesian film also with that title, and now this Mexican version.
This is a way Netflix maximizes the value of intellectual property it gets its hands on — remaking scripts for different audiences and new Netflix markets.
That’s all well and good for their bottom line. But this eye-rolling, overwrought and ungainly blend of the cloyingly cute with the criminally unjust and the far-fetched with the farcical is a hard watch outside of the Third World. Lurching between the grim ugliness of its reality and the wish-fulfillment fantasy twists in the plot left me slack-jawed.
North American audiences might appreciate it for its depiction of what life in a corrupt, unaccountable-to-anyone police state dictatorship is like, which is sobering to say the least. Whole sections of the American public are coming to understand what “due process” is and how the lack of it means the end of democracy. But that’s cold comfort in a movie that forces one to appreciate the sophistication gap in mainstream movies from the First World and what was once labeled The Third World.
Hector (Omar Chaparro of “Blackout” and “Como Caido del Cielo”) is a simple, happy widower who works in an animal shelter — optimistically scrubbing up every dog in the hope someone will adopt even the oldest of them, and never hesitating to take dogs that can’t be adopted home.
That’s the small farm where he lives with his elderly mother (Sofía Álvarez) and beloved little first-grader Alma (Marianna Calderón). Special Needs Hector doesn’t earn much, but as tiny tyke/shortlegged Alma is a school sprinting champion (the first ridiculously far-fetched plot element), he’s determined to buy her new sneakers for The Big Race.
But the intimidating captain of the military police (Jorge A. Jimenez) buys the pair of white sneakers for his own first-grader and pushes Hector around when he insists Alma must have them. That leads to the captain’s child following Hector and two refugees passing through to an abandoned factory.
The kid wants to give up the shoes. But one accident later and the captain’s kid is dead and he’s hellbent on unleashing the murderous power of the police state on the harmless and simple man who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Prison beatings by inmates led by convict Tiger (Gustavo Sánchez Parra), elaborate arrangements for Hector’s death by torture or summary execution by the captain and a Pontius Pilate of a prison warden and a mad scramble by Hector’s mom and Alma’s teacher (Natalia Reyes) to save him ensue.
“Every day the sun rises, your father’s one day closer to coming home,” Maestra Ingrid reassures her student (in Spanish, or dubbed into English, et al).
There are story elements to grab hold of even in the most clumsily simplistic plots. The sinister forces of the state only seek control and revenge. When the captain’s daughter is hurt and Hector frantically flags an army Jeep, no soldier lifts a finger to help her or call an ambulance.
They summon the captain, who also fails to reach out for medical help. The sunglassed goon has a Trumpian lack of compassion or any human emotion, much less grief. All he wants is revenge.
The prison inmates are murderously hard on “child killers,” but they let Hector live long enough to win them over with his simple-minded positivity and peace-making skills.
And somehow, tiny kids including an immigrant child are the perfect champions for saving Alma’s dad from state sanctioned murder.
Director Ana Lorena Pérez Ríos and screenwriter Patricio Saiz set their tale in a dictatorial corner of Mexico’s recent past, but never wholly commit to the “period piece” of the production.
The picture will test the patience of anybody who’s ever seen a melodrama, with its emotional manipulations as obvious as every “They wouldn’t go THERE” turn in the narrative.
At every point in ther plot, imagine the most far-fetched turn of events and that’s where the movie goes, over and over again.
The kid is cute, Chaparro and the adult cast believable within the story’s fantasy version of the Mexican prison and justice system.
But “A Father’s Miracle” is so corny and klunky that one wonders if any of the other versions have been the least bit believable. We know they were crowd pleasers, and this one might have an audience, too.
One wonders just who might buy into something so tooth-achingly sweet yet darkly dopey at the same time.
Ratung: TV-14, violence, some of it involving children, profanity
Cast: Omar Chaparro, Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Natalia Reyes, Jorge A. Jimenez and Mariana Calderón
Credits: Directed by Ana Lorena Pérez Ríos, scripted by Patricio Saiz, based on the Korean film “Miracle in Cell 7” by Lee Hwan-kung. .: A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:40
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