Stream It Or Skip It: ‘If I Were Rich’ on HBO Max, a Spanish Comedy That Capsizes Beneath a Bevy of Cliches

The latest in HBO Max’s growing library of Spanish-language films is If I Were Rich (Si Yo Fuera Rico), a broad comedy that looks like something Luke Wilson would’ve passed on 17 years ago. Alex Garcia stars as a total doof who wins the lottery before his divorce is final, and therefore tries to hide that fact from his soon-to-be-ex-wife even though any lawyer, or anyone with even one half-functioning eyeball and/or brain, could figure it out with a swiftness. I hereby don my waders and wield my sifter and venture into the river of this movie in hopes of finding a single glittering flake of comedy. I wish myself godspeed.

IF I WERE RICH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Santi (Garcia) is living a total shite life. He sleeps in his van and keeps getting tickets from the same policewoman for parking it illegally. He works crap odd jobs, and one of them is literal crap, because it involves emptying the septic containers on a rich guy’s boat. He hauls containers of excrement up the dock and barfs, which is a metaphor for the experience of watching this movie, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. He drives his van away and it runs out of gas and as he walks to the gas station a car drives by and splashes him with a giant puddle even though it’s a lovely nice sunny day and it doesn’t look like it’s rained in weeks. But a dark, pissy cloud hovers over him at all times: He’s going through a divorce. He’s 40-ish, but has the general psychological patina of a 14-year-old. No wonder she’s had enough.

Santi has two best pals, a total doof named Marcos (Adrian Lastra), frazzled by his two young kids and chaotic family life, and Pedro (Franky Martin), another total doof who works pumping gas and still lives with his mother. They like to go surfing and smoke weed and act like pubescent nimrods. Santi’s wife, Maite (Alexandra Jimenez), has had enough of his irresponsibility and lackadaisicalness and arrested development. She works as a — checks notes — higher-up? Carrier of file folders? — in the office of a grocery store owned by Mario (Diego Martin), the guy Santi, Marcos and Pedro called “Fatass” in high school, except now he’s the guy who’s skinny and rich and a killer surfer and who’s kadoinking Maite. But for reasons unknown to even history’s greatest analysts of the human mind, Maite is still somewhat worried about Santi, and arranges for him to work as a stockboy at the grocery store, and lets him move back into their house and sleep on the couch. He has no choice but to accept. Life is pain.

Down at the bottom of the barrel of existence, Santi buys a lottery ticket on a whim, and I’ll be danged and ding-donged if he don’t win €25 million. Cue an overhead victory shot of Santi with fists raised and howling in joy at the heavens set to Queen’s We Are the Champions. He absolutely does not want to give €12.5 million to Maite, especially since she’s fabloinking “Fatass.” There’s a month or three until the divorce is final. A smart man trying to get away with this might lay low and put the money in an offshore account or something, but no, he buys a bunch of fancy crap and starts living the high life, and then scrambles to hide it from everyone. He does all manner of pinheaded things like pouring very expensive wine into cheap-wine bottles at his and Maite’s house, which she inevitably drinks; he buys a high-end watch and repeatedly forgets to take it off and then has to make up a bunch of lies about it. You know, stuff like that. So how can Santi POSSIBLY solve all these problems his intelligence-deprived brain has thrust upon itself? NO REVELACIONES.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Back in the ’90s when I vowed to watch every Nicolas Cage movie in existence, I went to the theater to see It Could Happen to You, a sweet-as-the-dickens rom-com in which Cage plays a nice guy who realizes he can’t tip his waitress, played by the apparently-retired-but-not-forgotten-in-the-least Bridget Fonda. So he promises her half the bounty of his lottery ticket if he wins. Crap deal for her, except that he wins, because otherwise, we’d have real life and not Hollywood fantasy. It’s not a great movie by any means. Corny as heck. But I’d rather watch it 100 times than sit through If I Were Rich again.

Performance Worth Watching: Jimenez endures this remarkably unfunny movie with a modicum of class.

Memorable Dialogue: A waiter in a fancy restaurant serves Santi the rube a very expensive bottle of wine:

Waiter: Shall I decant?

Santi: Yes, yes of course. Shall you can’t the wine.

Sex and Skin: At the same time Santi hires a high-end prostitute in retaliation to Maite learning that “Fatass” is really bad in bed, we see approximately 1.75 uncovered female breasts.

Our Take: If I Were Rich is a poignant reminder that few things are quieter than the absence of laughter. It’s not even desperate for jokes — it half-heartedly presents dozens of cliches cobbled together from dozens of other movies, and the yield is zero. If you get some perverse glee out of stepping on punchlines several beats before they’re delivered, and derive pleasure from predicting every third-act plot development, then this’ll be a field day for you. Collect all your blue ribbons and go home a champion!

To be fair, the movie is slick and colorful. It looks fine. The cast is attractive and game for whatever. Too bad “whatever” is all that seems to have been written on the screenplay pages. The characters are nonsense people adhering to no earthly logic. We’d forgive it such frivolity if it produced a single serviceable joke, but nay. Nay, I say. Nay. Characters dig desperately through dumpsters; characters mistake the little towels at swanky restaurants for appetizers; characters fart; characters hate each other one minute and love each other the next with nary a shred of connecting tissue. Absolutely none of this works. And it’s sloppy. There were moments when I hit rewind because it seemed like there was a scene missing. There were many more moments when I wanted to hit fast-forward to get to the end of it.

Our Call: SKIP IT. If I Were Rich is not a good movie.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream If I Were Rich on HBO Max