Category: Review

Baby Assassins 3

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★★★
“Sorry for laughing.”

I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the Baby Assassins franchise may be some kind of surrealist joke, being played on me by its makers. I really want to love the series and, as with both Part 1 and Part 2, there are moments where I do. At points, I was genuinely considering this as a Top 10 movie I saw this year – not just among GWG movies either. But then, it’ll grind to a halt, with such dedication to being mind-numbingly tedious, that it feels almost like wilful self-sabotage. In reality, I think it’s more likely to be cultural and societal impenetrability. Some elements here are ones which are relatable to a Western audience. Others? Not so much. 

It takes place in Miyazaki, a seaside city in Japan. Our heroines, Chisato (Takaishi) and Mahiro (Izawa) are on a working holiday there. Or a holiday where work keeps interrupting, it’s hard to say. However, their commission becomes an issue, because another, non-guild assassin, Fuyumura (Ikematsu), is also on the job. The guild are unhappy, and order the pair not just to complete the commission, but also eliminate Fuyumura for cutting in on their turf. This will be easier said than done, even with the largely unwelcome help of guild supervisor, Minami (Maeda). She is less than impressed with the Gen Z approach of Chisato and Mahiro, who would rather be in a restaurant eating the renowned local beef. 

As before, it’s the action which really resonated with me, in particular a stunning series of close-quarters battles. And when I say “close”, I mean fights where the combatants are frequently inches from each other. The early sequence where Chisato goes up against Fuyumura is a good example: while there is a gun involved, there’s not enough space between them, for either to point it effectively at their opponent. [This is when I was thinking, potential top ten movie] It’s also notable that, in this installment, most of the sequences involve professional assassins going up against each other in one-on-one, or two-on-one, action, not the mass brawls of previous films. This exchange of quality for quantity is a better opportunity for the participants to show off actual skills.

But the stuff between the fights? Dear lord, this is mostly terrible. And, in a film which runs an entirely unnecessary one hundred and twelve minutes, it’s terrible at near-excruciating length. There are only so many times you can listen to Mahiro worry about forgetting Chisato’s 20th birthday before it becomes a chore, rather than a pleasure. For me, that limit is “once.” Being charitable, this kind of stuff probably plays better to a local audience, or maybe simply one closer to the protagonists’ ages. My tolerance for Gen Z shit is certainly closer to Minami’s, and may be lower still. I’ve no doubt I’ll be waiting for Baby Assassins 4; I just hope the makers decide that joke isn’t funny any more. 

Dir: Yugo Sakamoto
Star: Akari Takaishi, Saori Izawa, Sôsuke Ikematsu, Atsuko Maeda
a.k.a. Baby Assassins: Nice Days

De La Cruz

  By

★★½
“Proverbs 21:15.”

Which, in case you were wondering, is: “When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.” Though based on this, I would suggest adding “…eventually” to the end. Because you are going to need a lot of patience here. While this is a rape-revenge movie, the sexual assault in question takes almost an hour to show up. Until that point, there are two threads, and you’ll also be waiting for them to connect. By far the less interesting is the teenage soap opera of the pure and innocent Yoli De La Cruz (Diaz), and her friends, the somewhat annoying Daniella, and the immensely irritating Adriana. Boys, parties, etc. You know the score.

The other is rather more intriguing, being the struggle of former MMA fighter, now a cartel hitman, Lobo (Patiño), to leave the criminal life. This comes after a near-religious experience involving Santa Muerte, who is basically the personification of death in Mexican folklore. Meanwhile, Yoli ends up being raped by Victor (Issac GH). The moral here is, you’re clearly far better off being a slut like Adriana, and going with it. Victor is the son of the local police chief, so justice will not be done. However, this is where – after an hour and twenty minutes – the stories join up. Because Lobo turns out to be Daniella’s cousin, and agrees to teach Yoli a very particular set of skills, so she can administer her own vengeance. 

Things definitely improve in the latter stages, not least because Adriana is almost entirely absent. You will need to be extremely patient to get to the good stuff. Lobo holds the film together, and there’s a great scene where he’s talking to Yoli’s father (Gaviria), and explaining why he can’t do anything himself. The way Santa Muerte gets mixed in isn’t bad, though when she rises up behind Yoli before her first bout, it does look like someone cosplaying as the Grim Reaper. There is a reasonable amount of effort put into the heroine’s transition from shrinking violent to avenging angel, though it is a little montage heavy, writer/director Baez being unable to get out of his own way. 

It certainly needs a good half-hour edited out in the early stages, when there is simply far too much faffing around, to use a good old British phrase. There’s also a weird lack of location: while presumably set in Mexico, going by references to cockfighting arenas, etc. there’s a significant amount of English being spoken. It ends in “To be continued…” having opened, one hundred and thirty minutes earlier, with a “Part 1” caption. I had spent much of the previous two hours bracing for a cliffhanger, which mercifully never appears, this being relatively tidy. Would I mind a part two? That depends largely on whether Baez avoids the faffage which dragged the first half here down like an anchor. Lobo and Yoli going 100% vigilante might be of interest though. 

Dir: Michael Baez
Star: Sofia Diaz, Raul Patiño, Noe Issac GH, Fernando Gaviria

Damsel: No More, by P.S. Power

  By

Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

It’s rare that I can pin-point so exactly, the moment at which a book jumped the shark. But in this case, I can. I came across a paragraph which was so striking in its badness, I actually put the book down, to ponder what the heck I just read. It did not improve on several repeat attempts, and thereafter, I was simply unable to enjoy the book. Oh, it hadn’t been any great shakes to that point, but it became a genuine chore, and if I did not want to write this warning review, would certainly have become a DNF. Here we go:

Instead, she got out of the car, let Veronica lock up and secure the used towel in the back, in the trunk, which had a change of clothing in it, which the woman grabbed, carrying it with her. Since she still had chemicals all over her, that made sense to see to.

I am not exaggerating when I say that my eleven-year-old self would have been embarrassed to assemble those words in this order in a story. That this book is somehow rated over four stars on Goodreads makes me weep for the literacy of the population at large. The cover is what lured me in. The concept isn’t bad. But the execution is like being trapped inside the head of Kim Kardashian, and I would not wish that on my worst enemy. The heroine is Hannah de Peyser, a rich, vacuous heiress, who has had enough after the fourth time she gets kidnapped. “She might not be a hero, but she isn’t going to be anyone’s victim, not any longer. The damsel is gone, and in her place is a force to be reckoned with.”

Except… not mentioned, is that this is a bad superhero caper, with the world populated by caped crusaders with various powers. Our heroine initially has no such ability, but develops over the course of it, the ability to remote view people. If you’re thinking this could easily be used as a crutch to escape bad writing… No comment. She’s also apparently good at convincing people, including really stupid scenarios, such as that they are coated with an explosive that will blow up if they return to the United States. I feel like I lost measurable IQ points reading that chapter. 

In regard to action, so far, she has spent almost all her time training in VR, with the actual action highlight being her foiling a robbery at a truck stop. There is a lot of space spent discussing thing like a “third gait,” which is apparently a better way of running. I did not sign up for a kinesiology lecture, but apparently some people did: again, four-plus stars on Goodreads. I somehow ground my way through the pages to an underwhelming ending. Do not hold your breath for any more reviews.

Author: P.S. Power
Publisher: Orange Cat Publisher, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 8 in the Damsel series.

Burial

  By

★★★
“Werwolfs, not werewolves…”

There’s an interesting idea here, which somewhat works. But it’s perhaps a little too grounded for its own good.  It starts in a London flat, where senior citizen Anna Marshall (Walter) ambushes an intruder, handcuffing him to a radiator. Turns out he’s not just a burglar. He knows about her past, and wants the truth. So she tells him a story… At the very end of World War II, her identity was Brana Brodskaya (Vega). She was one member in a small group of Russian soldiers, who have been given a very important task: transport a box back from Berlin to Moscow. Oh, and bury it every night. Inevitably, their curiosity overcomes them, and the box is opened, to reveal Hitler’s corpse inside. 

Naturally, the remaining German forces are very keen to re-capture the Fuhrer’s body, to preserve the myth of his escape and survival. The group become bogged down in a Polish village, under attack from Nazi Werwolfs. Not, please note, actual werewolves. Though I have to say, that would have been pretty damn cool [I’m a big fan of Dog Soldiers, which does pit British soldiers against actual werewolves] The Werwolfs were resistance forces, left behind by the Nazis behind Allied enemy lines, as they advanced towards Germany. This is fact. As depicted here, they wear animals pelts when they attack, while burning mushrooms and lichen which cause their target to hallucinate. This is… rather less certain, albeit also kinda cool. 

Brodskaya is, clearly, the moral compass of the group, who tries to keep her comrades on task too – neither of which prove easy. When half of them split off seeking the “spoils of war”, she goes after them to stop them from committing war crimes on the civilian population. The locals are just tired of the conflict, and have little patience for either occupiers or liberators, not trusting either side. Parker does a good job of depicting the murkiness of a situation like this, where the lines of morality aren’t as clear-cut as you would initially expect. But the heroine is mission-oriented as well, and when control of the cargo is lost, she leads the charge to recover it, knowing the threat its loss would pose. 

Unfortunately, I found there to be significant issues with pacing, especially in the middle third which seems to contain several too many underlit action scenes in the woods. I’ve read multiple complaints about it being marketed as a horror movie, and certainly, if that’s what you are expecting, you will be severely disappointed. I had no such prejudices and so didn’t mind too much. Though I would have extended the flashback further, since there seems to be a lot of interesting material covered at the end, in a bit of an info-dump by Marshall. Between that and the non-lycanthropic werewolves, this is why I reckon there’s a lot of potential left unexplored here. An excellent concept, let down by only average execution.

Dir: Ben Parker
Star: Charlotte Vega, Tom Felton, Barry Ward, Harriet Walter

 

Wildcat

  By

★★★½
“She’s got claws.”

I was quite startled to read some of the scathing reviews this received. For I genuinely enjoyed it, to the point it likely came one element (which I’ll get to) from a seal of approval. Sure, it’s nothing particularly new overall. However, I found it consistently enjoyable, to the level I felt no desire to look at my phone at any point. These days, that’s high praise indeed. It takes place in a slightly alternate London, where gang bosses Frasier Mahoney (Charles Dance) and Mrs. Christina Vine (Krige) are on the edge of a war for control of the city. There’s also a rogue element, in the Mushka Gang, who have turned an East End estate into a no-go area.

Ada (Beckinsale) doesn’t have much to do with this, until her brother Edward (Hardiker) gets deep in debt to Mahoney. He kidnaps her daughter to ensure the money gets paid back. This forces Ada to carry out a heist on a jewellery store run by Vine, which is only the start in a series of problems. She does have assistance, in the shape of former lover Roman (Tan), who can help fence the product. Meanwhile, Ada is trying to get Mahoney blamed for the robbery, to start an inter-factional war that can cover their escape. Meanwhile meanwhile, we discover Ada and Edward’s past, and encounter a number of colourful characters, such as the foul-mouthed Galloway (Tom Bennett, channeling Budget Nick Frost).

There are a lot of moving parts, but Nunn keeps things clear. He has plenty of action experience, including the wonderful Scott Adkins vehicle One Shot, which was my favourite movie of 2021. This isn’t quite as relentlessly kinetic, yet keeps a good pace throughout. Tan actually gets as many action scenes as Beckinsale, and this brings me to the issue mentioned above. While she still looks the part – and very good for 52 – there’s an awful lot of shots from behind, strongly suggesting heavy stunt doubling. And it’s not subtly done. They might as well just have hired Laura Vörtler, Beckinsale’s stunt double, to play the part and been done with it. Still, despite clearly more limited resources, I preferred this to her last couple of actioners, Canary Black and Jolt.

It helps to have the likes of Krige and Dance in the supporting cast. The latter is barely seen until the end, though makes up for lost time with a blistering anecdote about his late wife. I really enjoyed Krige, whose character can go from comforting a grandchild troubled by bad dreams, to torturing an employee for information, without more than a blink. There are some elements which feel underdeveloped, such as a weird club which seems little more than a flimsy excuse to tie Beckinsale up. But overall, I enjoyed this, and particularly appreciated the bone-dry British humour peppered throughout. Although the lead may not have many more action films in her, Nunn continues to prove his credentials. 

Dir: James Nunn
Star: Kate Beckinsale, Lewis Tan, Rasmus Hardiker, Alice Krige

Paradox Effect

  By

★★½
“Not much effect on me.”

I’m always down for an Olga Kurylenko film. She’s been in some good entries on the site previously, including Sentinelle and High Heat. Her track record gets her the benefit of the doubt, for an entry like this, which might be a bit marginal if it starred another actress. Though American, it takes place in Bari, Italy where recovering junkie Karina (Kurylenko) is putting her life back together, and looking forward to the arrival of her young daughter, Lucy (Astons).  However, on the way home from a late-night shift at the bakery where she works, she stumbles into a murder commited by mob courier Covek (Trevena), which becomes a car-chase, ending in a fiery crash.

The problem is, this  burned up the drugs Covek was supposed to be delivering to Silvio (Keitel). He “recruits” – quotes used advisedly – Karina to acquire a replacement stash, a process which drags them both through the Italian underworld over the course of the night. Matters are not helped by a couple of factors. Silvio has Covek’s son as a hostage, so noncompliance is not an option. Oh, and did I mention that Covek is actually an Interpol agent, who will go to any lengths to make sure Silvio faces justice? On the other side, Karina will go to any lengths to make sure her own daughter is not harmed. But the trail of destruction being left in the wake of her and Covek’s hunt for heroin is not exactly subtle. 

I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing. It feels as if Karina needs to be more central than she is. She ends up spending too much time either doing Covek’s bidding, or following him around, and that’s not what I wanted to see. Kurylenko > Trevena, except the film doesn’t seem to realize it.  Keitel, another actor I like, is also underused. To the point where, up until the very end, I half-wondered if he filmed all his scenes somewhere else, and was then spliced into the movie during the editing stage. That turns out not to be the case. But the mere fact it seems possible is another illustration of the wobbly execution. 

Even basic stuff like the film’s title, which is both strikingly generic and never explained, is maddening. Opening with a quote from Nietzche sets intellectual aspirations the rest of the movie isn’t able to sustain. I will say, it is technically decent: I appreciated little things, like them deciding to blow up a genuine car, rather than faking it with CGI. When given the chance, Kurylenko does well in the action, though quite why Karina has these skills is never explained. It would have been improved by being the film depicted in the poster (I must have missed Kurylenko’s pleather suit), simply having Karina trying to get the replacement drugs herself. In that scenario, Covek becomes surplus to the film’s requirements. A win-win, I’d say. 

Dir: Scott Weintrob
Star: Olga Kurylenko, Oliver Trevena, Harvey Keitel, Alice Astons

Compulsion

  By

★★★
“Rated R, for raunchy and rough.”

The “erotic thriller” now seems almost as quaint a part of cinema history as beach party films. It feels partly as if the Harvey Weinstein scandal made nudity and sexuality taboo in Hollywood. The rise of the Internet also provides easy access to all the naked flesh anyone could possibly want. Regardless of the cause, there are no longer big budget films like Basic Instinct or Wild Things being made, let alone being #6 at the North American box-office for the year, as Instinct managed [that said, United Artists paid $2 million for the reboot rights earlier this year. We’ll see; I’m not optimistic]. So in some ways, this feels like a throwback, drawing influence from Brian de Palma and Paul Verhoeven.

It’s the fourth, and supposedly final, collaboration between director Marshall and his wife/star Kirk. Two of the previous ones have been covered here, in The Lair and Duchess; I haven’t yet seen the other, witchcraft film The Reckoning. But there can’t be many directors who have worked so often with their spouses. Maybe Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich? The results for this couple have certainly fallen short of peak Marshall, such as The Descent, or even Doomsday, both commercially and critically. While this likely won’t change the narrative, I’m not averse to a nostalgic combo of gratuitous nudity and graphic violence. I’ll leave Mr. and Mrs. Marshall to figure out what it means for the relationship, in their couples’ therapy sessions. 

It takes place in Malta where a shapely cat-suit clad serial killer is committing some particularly brutal murders. Investigating the case is local detective Claudia Cavara (Gorietti), with the two main suspects Diana (Kirk), a bisexual thief with a hot boyfriend (McGowan), and her lesbian neighbour, Evie (Sieklucka). Will there be steamy trysts, voyeurism, and a Euro-pudding of accents, from Poland to Yorkshire? Yes, of course! Sieklucka was in those 365 Days films on Netflix, after all. You will also experience what may well be the stabbiest scene in film history, making Psycho look like a Sunday School play. While I felt the victim was certainly deserving (I hated his hair), it showed Marshall has clearly taken influence from Italian giallo films, with their masked killers and hyperviolence. 

It is, however, nowhere near as good as Basic Instinct. Kirk isn’t fit to hold Sharon Stone’s ice-pick, and the whole police side of things is embarrassingly half-baked. It also feels as if Marshall was more into the violence than the sex, and there was a point, probably about two-thirds in, where I realized I didn’t particularly care about anyone. The decision to make it a whodunnit backfires too, because there are an extremely limited number of possible suspects. The end result is therefore quite a mess, and I can understand the critical disdain. However, it’s a mess which had its moments, and was definitely among the most R-rated of movies I saw this year. More of those will always be welcome. 

Dir: Neil Marshall
Star: Charlotte Kirk, Anna-Maria Sieklucka, Zach McGowan, Giulia Gorietti

Sheriff Bride: Dan’s Story, by Cheryl Williford

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

Despite the fact that all of the books of this series are written by different authors, they exhibit a lot of similarity in style, and also in literary quality. Since the quality tends to be wanting, that’s not a good thing. (My wife Barb really likes these books, which is why we read them together; and even I find the premise novel and intriguing. But it suffers from mediocre and even amateurish execution.) However, Williford has a bit smoother, less pronoun-averse and a trifle more textured prose style than her colleagues, and also a more realistic and less “vegetarian” approach to the realities of lethal force in law enforcement than the first two books displayed. There are situations that can arise where killing a determined aggressor is the only way to protect innocent lives; and she recognizes both the fact that a decent person doesn’t want to do that and may be severely torn up by the pain of doing it, and that neither the reluctance nor the pain change the moral necessity of doing it at times. In fairness to the author of the first book, Teresa Ives Lilly, her heroine realized this as well, but was able to make a decision to disable rather than kill in the particular case she had to confront. But circumstances may not always provide that option…

How much time has elapsed since the previous book isn’t explicitly stated at the outset; but there, the oldest Hardin sister Sam was newly pregnant and here she’s full term, so we can infer about nine months. Here, the focus is on the third-oldest of the quartet, Dan, who’s the sole viewpoint character – though, as always in the series, narration is in third person. Mutual attraction between her and circuit-riding preacher Joshua Plain was already established in the first book, so the romantic focus in this one is predictable, to the readers, the Waterhole townsfolk, and Dan’s sisters; she’s the only one with doubts about it, centering on whether or not her affection is returned, and on whether she’s cut out to be a preacher’s wife. The short length of the book keeps the angst over this from getting too repetitive and wearing.

There’s no single overall conflict here, so even with just 104 pages the plot has an episodic quality; attention passes from Dan’s venture of opening a café on the side, to allow scope for her cooking talents (Joshua, with 19th-century prejudice against women in business, is very opposed to the idea –though he’s had to admit that she and her sisters are very qualified peace officers!– and to her credit she sticks to the idea anyway), to Sam’s pregnancy and delivery, to the problem of a couple of newly-arrived underage saloon girls, and to the conflict with a tyrannical local rancher. And sometimes we shift back and forth among these. Williford doesn’t really develop the latter character enough to make his motives, and his drastic escalation of the conflict, really credible. On the other hand, the character of young Native American woman (and Christian convert) Morning Glory gets to shine here. Though I’m still not buying the secondary romantic thread provided for her! The role of prayer and Christian faith in God’s guidance in the main characters’ lives is treated positively, and I appreciated the point that combative fighting over Bible interpretation doesn’t please God. The Apostle Paul would agree!

There are a number of editorial issues here that simple proofreading and minimal attention to detail would have corrected, and that frequently took me out of the story. The rancher’s last name changes unaccountably from Dunner to Norton, and then to Newton, in different parts of the book, and sometimes between paragraphs. (Rolls eyes.) We’re told at one point that a circuit judge will arrive tomorrow; but that doesn’t happen, and a prisoner remains in jail with no realistic follow-up. Then near the end, a “district judge” from Dallas makes a quick appearance in response to a telegram. Dallas is in eastern, not western, Texas, and it’s not likely that Waterhole would have been in the same judicial district. We learn here that Morning Glory’s grandmother was of the Comanche tribe, kidnapped and raped by an Apache, among whose people Morning Glory and her mother were raised. But it was said in the second book that she was from Wisconsin, which is quite far north and east from the Apache homeland. There are several other clashing details, that show poor attention to the writing craft. Despite all of these issues, I do like the Hardin sisters as characters; I just regret that they weren’t blessed with more competent chroniclers!

Author: Cheryl Williford
Publisher: Lovely Christian Romance, available from Amazon, as a printed book or for Kindle.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Killing Mary Sue

  By

★½
“Death becomes her.”

Is there anything worse than a comedy which doesn’t land? I get that humour is subjective, but this action-comedy manages to be spectacularly unfunny, to a degree I have to wonder how it got made. There are some well-known people in the cast: actors who I know have talent (to the list below, you can add Martin Kove and Jake Busey), and whose work I have previously enjoyed. What did they see in the script here, which made them think, “Yes, this is something I want to do”? For this is the cinematic equivalent of nails being dragged across a chalkboard for an hour and a half. You don’t watch this, so much as endure it.  

To be fair, I think the characters being so repellent is a conscious, deliberate choice. You have sleazy politician Bradley Weiner (Mulroney), and his problematic step-daughter, Mary Sue (McCormick). She’s an utter brat, with no interest in anything except partying hard. With a key election looming, and Weiner trailing in the polls, he and his campaign adviser (Busey) decide to bump Mary Sue off, both to end her scandals, and for a sympathy bump in the polls. However, she proves remarkably hard to terminate: there is eventually an explanation for this, though it’s more of the “Wait a minute…” variety, than anything convincing. Still, Mary Sue’s survival forces her father to up the ante, and repeatedly send nastier assassins to try and finish the job. 

The first chunk of this is energetically devoted to demonstrating how terrible everyone is. The problem might be, it’s too damn successful. They never recover: for Weiner, it’s fair enough, since he is the nominal “bad guy.” But for Mary Sue, this is a problem, since you want your heroine to have some redeeming qualities. I genuinely couldn’t find any. Indeed, I was beginning to sympathize with her father, since in her position, putting her down like the mad dog she is, feels almost like responsible parenting. [Our teenage daughter wasn’t exactly a saint; yet she’s Mother freakin’ Teresa beside Mary Sue] This is all lazily blamed on daddy issues, her biological father being murdered in front of her, when he was robbing a convenience store. 

The concept of her being a real-life Mary Sue is potentially amusing, except that’s as far as it goes. Simply repeating a cliché of bad writing, doesn’t stop it from being a cliché, and writer-director Sunshine does nothing more. Have her slowly and gracelessly roll away from a hail of bullets, or mentioning video-game auto-aiming capabilities, simply isn’t enough. Especially when Mary Sue shows no sign of a character arc, and remains resolutely unlikable until her sudden, thoroughly unconvincing and revelatory change at the end. Sort of. I’m not even going to get into the lumpen and turgid whacks at unsubtle political satire: guys, the Russian are interfering in ‘Merican politics! If you find that intrinsically amusing, you know where to find this film. 

Dir: James Sunshine
Star: Sierra McCormick, Dermot Mulroney, Sean Patrick Flanery, Jason Mewes

Undercover

  By

★★★½
“The long game.”

It’s surprising to me that there are currently no English-language external reviews listed for this on the IMDb. It’s certainly worthy of notice outside its native Spain, where it was nominated for thirteen Goyas, the local equivalent of the Oscars, winning Best Film and Best Actress. It takes place over a number of years around the turn of the millennium, when the Spanish state was in a notorious and bloody war against ETA, a terrorist group fighting for the independence of the Basque region. Mónica (Yuste) is a cop who is recruited by Angel (Tosar) to go deep undercover, and infiltrate ETA in order to provide information on the group, its members and their plans.

This takes a very long time, the group understandably being suspicious of outsiders and extremely cautious about in whom they put their faith. We dip into the life of “Arantxa”, the new identity of Mónica, as she becomes active in the separatist movement, laying the groundwork to be seen as reliable and, more importantly, trustworthy. It takes six years before she is finally allowed entrance and given a mission of note: providing shelter for Kepa (Gastesi), an ETA member on the run. Having gained his confidence, she is then brought in to a bigger plan, bringing leader Sergio (Anido) back into Spain, and restablishing an ETA cell in San Sebastian, to attack judges, police and other targets. 

There isn’t anything particularly new here. You can probably tick off the story elements as they show up, if you’ve seen any other “undercover cop” thrillers along the same lines. It’s basically a series of narrow escapes in which Arantxa’s true identity is almost discovered. Sergio finds the phone she uses to talk to Angel, for example, or she is almost unable to return a folder after she passed it to the cops for copying. She starts to have feelings for Kepa too, while Angel faces resistance to the operation from the highers-up. Oh, and #Sexism, because it’s Spain. All fairly boilerplate stuff. However, the secret sauce is in the execution, which Echevarría does with no shortage of skill, particularly when it comes to dialling up the tension.

It is based on a true story, though to what extent it’s accurate, I can’t say. Here, not knowing the eventual outcome going in, except at the highest level (I was aware that ETA ended up disbanding) is likely a help. Because you won’t know whether or not Mónica completes her mission successfully – and, a different question, makes it out alive. I did appreciate there’s not much effort at moral grey here. Sometimes a terrorist is just a bad guy, and if you have any doubts about Sergio, his treatment of Monica’s cat will dissolve those [If they do not, we really can’t be friends!] Again, it’s not the subtlest of plotting. Yet between it and Echevarria’s skilled hand, it all undeniably gets the job done.

Dir: Arantxa Echevarría
Star: Carolina Yuste, Luis Tosar, Iñigo Gastesi, Diego Anido
a.k.a. La Infiltrada