Instructions Not Included

Last week it was my grandmother's birthday and she came over to the house and we had lunch. After, we went to see a movie. Instructions Not Included , or No se Aceptan Devoluciones, appears to be a cheesy comedy about a man who is forced to have to raise a child alone, after the mother leaves the little girl with the father. It reminded me of that Adam Sandler movie with Dylan and Cole Sprouse, and the IMDb ratings made me believe that it would be just as bad. BUT IT WASN'T. IMDb only had five critics’ reviews. At a glance, the 55 score that the movie got made me believe that the movie would be an awful Latino Hollywood movie, while in reality most critics liked it, and probably IMDb wouldn't put up the reviews that were in Spanish, because the majority of the film is in Spanish. 
            The first half is awful, but that's a necessary evil to set up the rest of the film. Once the mother comes back, shit starts to get real. You find yourself at the edge of your seat trying to figure out where everything started to get insane, and the cheesy comedy in the movie is all just a cruel joke to you, because the last five minutes you will cry so hard. Every cliché that you think would happen doesn't, and you find yourself spending hours after the film is over, trying to figure out what the movie was about, because the commercials advertise it as a heartwarming comedy for the whole family, when in reality it's a depressing story about a man who is facing what fear is.
            The director and co-writer of the film is a Mexican comedian named Eugenio Derbez. He is a very well known actor in Latin America, and this was his first venture into directing, and you can see that in his film, but you overlook tiny errors when you're left in tears. I know him from a film we watched in Spanish class, Under the Same Moon, where he moved away from comedy to try serious acting. He wasn't bad, though that movie wasn't good. He best known in Latin America for his television show La Familia P. Luche which ran for a decade.
            My advise to anyone who finds themselves watching Instructions Not Included is to stay until the end. You might want to kill yourself in the first half an hour, but it'll be worth once you see the end. Derbez knew exactly what is and isn't cliché because he has been in some awful films, like Jack and Jill, but he is smart enough to know how to make that cliché into something so original that you feel bad for ever calling his film cliché.