Who's Yer Father? (Movie Review)

I have to talk about this movie; it's very much a PEI sort of thing, and people outside of the Maritimes probably didn't even hear about it, let alone watch it. And if they did, they wouldn't have understood half of it. But I have to say, it was a hell of a good time.

Even Wikipedia doesn't have much to say about it:

Who's Yer Father? is a 2023 Canadian crime comedy film, written, produced, and directed by Jeremy Larter. The film stars Chris Locke as Larry Constable, a bumbling private investigator in a small Prince Edward Island town who teams up with convenience store owner Rhonda Perry (Susan Kent) to investigate a black market lobster smuggling ring.

And that's about it, aside from some more cast info and a brief mention of when it was filmed and released. It doesn't really do the movie justice.

I wasn't sure about going to it at first, but my wife really wanted to go, and it was on a limited release. So, we made a date of it, and sat down to one of the funniest movies I've watched in a long time. It's funny because it is so dead-accurate to life on PEI. I've been asked the title question many times when people find out I was born here. And it was quite cool seeing a couple of places I've actually been to appear in the movie. Charlottetown and Summerside aren't featured at all in this movie; it's very much a rural thing. Which covers 95% of this island, really.

The movie suggests that PEI doesn't actually have any private investigators, or rather only has the one, which I actually had to look into to find out if it was true. I've never required the services of a PI before, so the question of whether or not there are any on this island never came up until I saw this movie.

It's not exactly family-friendly; the language is coarse at best, and there is a lot of suggestive sexual references, although there's no nudity. Still, it's quite...earthy. The violence is either suggested and not shown, or it's absurd and played for laughs. Overall, though, this movie is definitely not for kids.

There are a few loose ends that never get tied up, such as what ends up happening to Larry's ostensible client, or whether or not the black market lobster ring (that still sounds funny as hell in my mind) is ever broken up. Let's just say that Larry will not be mistaken for Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot any time soon. But at least he can play the guitar, which those other two couldn't do, so he gets some bonus points for that.

I'm going to rate this movie an 8 out of 10; it's flawed, and as I said it's not for families, but it's a great little slice of the humorous side of life on a small island province. If it shows up on one of the streaming sites, check it out.