In short: Below Zero (2021)

Original title: Bajocero

Spanish police man Martín’s (Javier Gutiérrez) first night at his new posting turns out rather a lot more dangerous than he could have expected. Being one of two men (and two guys in a police car we don’t need to get into) tasked with a night transport of half a dozen or so prisoners through some very cold regions of Northern Spain is an uncommon enough first night. Said transport being attacked, Martín’s colleagues getting killed and things turning into a siege scenario and not the break-out it first seems to be certainly makes the night pretty singular.

This Spanish Netflix premiere directed by Lluís Quílez is a pretty decent little thriller. For its first act, it does tend to rely rather too heavily on very well-worn genre tropes and character types, but come the second act, it does put a bit of effort into humanizing the walking-talking tropes a little, so that the efficiently staged violence and the expertly worked siege movie variations surrounding them get a bit more emotional impact. The actors do their best here too, bringing more personality to the characters than the script strictly shows; but then, that’s really the proper low budget action thriller approach to this sort of situation, unless you’re Howard Hawks working from a Leigh Brackett script, or John Carpenter.

And Quílez does good work with the various suspense set-ups, using the prison transport vehicle in various clever ways for action and suspense.

The only elements of the movie I’m not too fond of are its weird knee-jerk “fuck yeah! torture and vigilantism!” ending (particularly given what the film’s main vigilante has done throughout the film), and the sort of desaturated, greenish colour scheme I had hoped had died with the turn of the 00’s into the 2010’s. Well, that, and the practically complete absence of women from the film.

Three Films Make A Post: One Cop. One Vigilante. Alone, they're unstoppable. Together, they're invincible!

Hugo (2011): Now, it would be quite easy to put on my cynical hat here and treat this as your typical Oscar bait movie, seeing as it contains children, is a heart-warming hymn on the art of film making, and has a very self-conscious happy end where everyone and everything wins. However, that’s not at all how Hugo feels to me. Instead, I see a heart-felt film made with all the love Scorsese so obviously feels for the history of movies and specifically Georges Méliès, created with a loving hand primarily for the eyes of his daughter. It’s a film whose happy end incorporates the sides of life that aren’t happy at all, a film that implies one of the things that makes us love art is its ability to fix the wrongs and injustices of life in it, seeing cinema’s happy ends as a way to push us into making happy ends in the world too.

Out of the Dark (2014): Director Lluís Quílez’s attempt to crack the US market is certainly a technically accomplished film but for a movie featuring the basic creepy menace of ghost children with rags on their faces, it feels surprisingly harmless, with little content that could actually disturb. That might be on account of the highly basic nature of its characterizations (seriously, could Julia Stiles and Scott Speedman be any blander?), and the obvious and predictable nature of every little thing that happens in it.

While I don’t exactly need everything grim and gritty (as my appreciation of Hugo shows), I’d also have wished for the film’s resolution to have felt less like an afternoon special and more like something with actual emotional impact, but then, that would – again – have needed some actual character work or depth, and that’s not something this particular film seems comfortable with.

The ABCs of Death 2 (2014): As a concept, this anthology movie series really is difficult to beat, because while you won’t like everything in here, the shortness of each single piece makes it difficult to become too annoyed by the ones you don’t like. Among the 26 short films here, there’s the stupid, the silly, the misanthropic, the clever, the disquieting and the gosh-darn bizarre, mixed via the awesome powers of the alphabet, and created by directors from all over the globe. To my tastes, there’s a lot more to like than to dislike here. At least, I found myself in turn laughing, shaking my head, looking puzzled and feeling mildly disgusted, and what more could I ask from a project like this?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,colombian movies,drama,fantasy,comedy,horror,martin scorsese,ben kingsley,lluís quílez,julia stiles,scott speedman