a5c7b9f00b Bob Bolano and Terry Monroe are two crooked Albuquerque PD detectives. They tend to hustle criminals but their methods have landed them in hot water with their boss, and they are on their last warning. They get wind of a heist and decide to muscle in on the action, robbing the perpetrators. Unfortunately for them, the mastermind of the heist is someone out of their league, someone they would do well to fear. Two corrupt cops set out to blackmail and frame every criminal unfortunate enough to cross their path. Events, however, are complicated by the arrival of someone who appears to be even more dangerous than they are. Let me start out by saying I&#39;m a huge fan of John Michael McDonagh&#39;s work, especially The Guard. That being said this movie was a miss in my opinion.<br/><br/>All the elements are there for a quirky send up of a genre movie; the strange broken characters, the thuggish cops that have their hearts in the right place, the out of place philosophical quotes etc. It&#39;s all there, but it never really gels. All the building blocks remain building blocks, the characters remain strangely stereotypical, despite trying to break most stereotypes. Their backstories are never developed and never explained, even though their erratic behaviour would do well with some sort of explanation. We&#39;re not in a small town in Ireland here, these are young, &#39;hip&#39; characters that act very unlike their peers for no apparent reason. This is even voiced by Skarsgard&#39;s character when he asks Pena why he sticks with him only to receive the wholly unsatisfying answer of &#39;because you&#39;re a good friend of mine&#39;. This is where camaraderie could explain away plot holes, but the chemistry just isn&#39;t there, imho largely thanks to Skarsgard*. The result is that at the end of the film you can still taste each ingredient in the final dish, instead of them blending together and forming a whole. <br/><br/>It&#39;sif they struck gold with The Guard and didn&#39;t want to veer too far off the beaten track. Or worse,if some American producers saw that film and went &#39;we want that, but set in America&#39;. Well you can&#39;t capture lightning in a bottle, and you especially can&#39;t capture it in America, so all the charm and humour of the original falls flat here. <br/><br/>*Oh and I must make a special note for how bad of a choice Skarsgard was for this role. His accent is simply terrible, I actually had to look him up to see what his native language was, because he kept slipping into some strange amalgamation of an American Swedish accent. He was audibly influenced by David Wilmot&#39;s Irish accent in their scenes together, so he comes out with some odd mock-Irish twang which really takes you out of the scene. All this would have been mildly annoying if they left his origin uncertain, but he makes jokes about Europeans very clearly implying the character is meant to be from the US. In addition to his accent troubles he also clearly had trouble keeping up with Michael Pena&#39;s quick patter, which was also detrimental to the development of their on screen chemistry and my immersiona viewer.<br/><br/>All in all I must say this one was a miss, but I&#39;m still looking forward to the next one. This is a buddy cop thriller with a surreal black comedy edge. Though this is British Film Institute funded, it&#39;s probably best that you know beforehand that this is not your typical Guy Richie style gangster movie.<br/><br/>Set in Mexico, the two antihero cops are ultimately good guys at heart, they just prefer not to do anything by the book, they&#39;re mostly out for serving themselves than serving the public.<br/><br/>They learn that a million dollar heist is being planned, and they set about letting the crime happen in order to ultimately steal the cash.<br/><br/>The horizontal wipes and the soundtrack (mainly Glen Campbell) gives this film an old-fashioned feel. You can&#39;t help comparing some of the scenes with Tarantino&#39;s work.<br/><br/>I liked the zany black humour, the chemistry between the two cops, the atmospheric close-ups, and the on-going &#39;indestructible&#39; car &#39;joke&#39;.<br/><br/>You&#39;ll enjoy this film if not easily offended by racist or sexist jokes, the purpose of which is to create constant ironic humour. Otherwise it&#39;s not a bad movie, not a great movie, but definitely different from the norm. McDonagh’s script is so ad hoc, so clumsily random, that nothing adds up to anything.
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295 weeks ago