Three stars. Rated R, for profanity, violence and sexual content
By Derrick Bang
If the rest of this film were as
accomplished as David Oyelowo’s starring performance, it would be far more
entertaining.
Who knew Oyelowo could be so
adorable and laugh-out-loud hilarious? It’s quite a surprise from the actor who
brought such dignity to memorable roles in A United Kingdom, Queen of Katwe
and Selma (the latter playing no less
than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.).
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| Harold (David Oyelowo, left) grows increasingly suspicious when his bosses — Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Elaine (Charlize Theron) — insist on joining him for what should be a routine visit to their pharmaceutical company's Mexican manufacturing plant. |
Clearly, true acting talent knows
no genre boundaries.
Alas, Oyelowo is by far the best part
of Gringo, which otherwise is a mess.
Scripters Matthew Stone and Anthony Tambakis appear to be going for the uneasy
blend of crime thriller and dark-dark-dark
comedy that was pulled off so brilliantly by 1993’s True Romance, but that’s a hard act to duplicate. That film was
scripted by Quentin Tarantino, and — frankly — Stone and Tambakis aren’t fit to
clean the keys of his laptop.
The elements are in place here;
Stone and Tambakis simply don’t know how to blend the ingredients into a
suitably tasty final product. They badly misjudge some character development,
overlook some obvious plot twists, and build to a resolution with at least one
(perhaps two) deeply unsatisfying outcomes.
Nash Edgerton’s direction doesn’t
help; his handling of the film’s tone is all over the map, and he lets co-star
Charlize Theron get away with a truly dreadful performance (something I wasn’t
aware she was capable of). Edgerton is a former stunt man and director of video
shorts with only one prior big-screen feature to his credit — 2008’s so-so The Square — and I can’t help wondering
if his presence here has less to do with having paid sufficient dues, and more
to do with his relationship to better-known younger brother Joel Edgerton, who
also co-stars in this uneven thriller.
In Hollywood, it truly does pay
to have friends in high places.
The story is complicated, so get
out your notebooks:
Harold Soyinka, an intelligent
but naïvely loyal manager at the pharmaceuticals firm Promethium, is blindly
unaware that his boss and (supposed) best friend, Richard Rusk (Edgerton), is a
rapacious corporate shark who is cheerfully willing to screw anybody in service
of further fattening his bank account. Indeed, Richard is screwing company co-owner Elaine Markinson (Theron), a
jaw-droppingly crass, vulgar and profane bitch who casually employs sex as a
weapon.
Theron’s initial scenes are a
perfect example of Nash Edgerton’s poor direction. Her crude, bad-mannered
put-downs and liberal F-bombs look and sound contrived, as if Theron isn’t
comfortable delivering them, or doesn’t believe in her character ... or something. Whatever the reason, her
performance is off-kilter, and remains so; the film never recovers from Elaine’s
behavior.
Richard also is sleeping with
Harold’s wife, Bonnie (a miscast and badly used Thandie Newton), because ...
well, just because. Neither Bonnie nor this sidebar affair is well developed.
At some point in the recent past,
Richard and Elaine “solved” a cash-flow problem by supplying drugs from their
Mexican-based manufacturing plant to local cartel head Villegas (Carlos Corona),
better known as — I’m not making this up — The Black Panther. He’s a very,
very, very bad man, as evidenced by
his willingness to have an underling’s big toe sliced off with a tree lopper: a
wholly unnecessary moment of on-camera gore that further demonstrates Nash
Edgerton’s ham-fisted tendencies.
So now, on the verge of a
profitable merger strengthened by Promethium’s development of the world’s first
marijuana pill, Richard and Elaine instruct their Mexican plant manager to stop
dealing with Villegas. Easy to say, impossible to comply with, although Richard
and Elaine seem oblivious to this: difficult to accept, even in this sort of
story, and a further indication of the tone-deaf script.
Harold, also present on this
corporate trip to Mexico, finally puts all the pieces together and realizes the
overwhelming degree to which he has been lied to, cheated and otherwise
shafted. He therefore concocts a half-baked scheme to fake his kidnapping by
Mexican thugs, hoping to extort a $5 million ransom from Richard, and wholly
unaware that — for reasons having more to do with proximity than plot logic — Villegas
genuinely does intend to kidnap him.
Meanwhile...
Back in the States, we’ve seen
music store manager Miles (Harry Treadaway) talked into becoming a drug mule
during a “quick and easy” trip to Mexico. He’s even allowed to bring along his
sweetly innocent girlfriend, the aptly named Sunny (Amanda Seyfried), who — in
one of the film’s genuinely amusing lines — is derisively dubbed “Guitar-Shop
Barbie.”
Miles and Sunny wind up at the
same fleabag Mexican hotel where Harold, in an adjacent room, hatches his
ill-advised plot.
But wait, there’s more!
Richard, convinced that
“rescuing” Harold (who isn’t yet in actual trouble, but soon will be) would be
in the best interest of pre-merger publicity, coaxes his former
mercenary-for-hire-turned-aid worker brother, Mitch (Sharlto Copley), into
mounting an “extraction mission.”
Additional sidebar characters
include Richard’s nosy secretary (Melonie Diaz, as Mia); a debonair but somehow
sinister hotel manager (Yul Vazquez, as Angel); and the numb-nuts brothers who
run the aforementioned fleabag hotel (Diego Cataño and Rodrigo Corea, as
Ronaldo and Ernesto).
The driving plot point amid all
this chaos is that Harold and (to a lesser degree) Sunny are two innocents
tossed into this pool of venal, vicious, back-stabbing and soul-sucking sharks
... and whether they can survive the ensuing ordeal. Trouble is, Harold and
Sunny are almost too blindly gullible and — let’s go there — stupid to earn our sympathy.
Seyfried, in particular, has an
impossibly hard time making Sunny anything but a New Age goody-two-shoes with
an eye-rollingly chipper view of life (despite repeated evidence to the
contrary). Honestly, you expect her to break into song while surrounded by
animated Disney birds.
Oyelowo, on the other hand,
surmounts all character contrivance and owns
his role. I’d hate to think any adults this credulous and hopelessly
unsophisticated actually navigate our mean streets ... but if such a person
exists, Oyelowo persuasively depicts that guy. The worse things get, the more
credibly hilarious he becomes. He single-handedly drags this film up from the
seventh circle of cinematic hell to ... well, at least the fourth or third
circle.
Joel Edgerton phones in his
performance, without a trace of the far better acting chops he’s simultaneously
demonstrating in Red Sparrow. (Once
again, we have to blame his director brother.) Treadaway is reasonably
convincingly as an opportunistic twit. Copley, as always, is a hoot. We see him
too seldom, and usually only in films made by fellow South African Neill
Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium and Chappie).
Copley’s character doesn’t
surface until well into these muddled proceedings, and he adds some welcome
spirit.
The various technical credits are
adequate, although the film’s pacing isn’t helped by the three (!) credited
editors: Luke Doolan, David Rennie and Tatiana S. Riegel. Feels like too many
cooks spoiled the soup.
A final passing observation: Nash
Edgerton and his writers don’t seem to think much of Mexico or its people,
given a storyline that luxuriates in cultural character assassination. That
also won’t play well, given our current socio-political environment.
We viewers — and Oyelowo —
deserved better.
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