★★
“Not brought to you by the Mexican Tourist Board…”
Nora (Carrere) and her two American friends cross the border to Tijuana for a weekend of partying. It doesn’t quite go as expected: the trio instead end up locked up in a Mexican police-station. When two cops on guard at the jail attempt to rape one of her pals, Nora grabs a gun and shoots them both dead. While this perhaps does solve the immediate problem, it obviously creates some rather heftier issues. The three women go on the run, assisted by another inmate, Juan Delgado (Gómez), who has the local knowledge they need to survive south of the border. It turns out Juan was just about to sneak across the American border, and he agrees that if they will fund the payment to the coyotes for him and his family, they can come too.
To say this doesn’t present a positive portrayal of Mexico as a holiday destination would be putting it mildly. Even though the incident which kicks everything off is actually the result of uncouth actions by another group of tourists, it doesn’t exactly depict the locals – the police, especially – in anything except a horrible light. Of course, this is also the poster-child for Bad Decisions Made Overseas, so it’s not as if Nora and her pals deserve to escape the consequences of their own actions. #1 would be “Going to Tijuana,” which in the mid-nineties was a major drug-hub, the local cartel being among the most feared gangs in Mexico. [In 1997, the DEA called the Tijuana Cartel “undeniably the most violent” organization.] So, my sympathy for Nora’s predicament is muted at best.
Even Juan and his family aren’t exactly sympathetic. Between cheerfully confessing that “everybody” wants to sneak across to America, and the gun-battle that breaks out between the illegal immigrants and the federal agents on the U.S. side, they’re basically walking advertisements for Trump’s wall. While this may be partly the result of societal changes over the two decades since this was released in 1995, I think it probably seemed dubious at the time, based off the poorly-considered scenes spent both at the American consulate and behind the scenes with the Border Patrol. I kept expecting these to play some role in subsequent events: never happens.
The main positive from this is Carrere, whose portrayal of Nora provides – despite the snark above – an energetic enough heroine, pro-active rather than reactive. She especially seems so, when set beside her two travel-mates, who largely sit around bemoaning their fates. There’s no particular reason why there need to be three women here at all; the others serve little purpose, except for an embarrassing subplot where one of them slept with the other’s boyfriend. Not that this has any significant impact, thanks to the “sisters before misters” philosophy on view. If this had been a solo adventure for Nora, Carrere has the charisma to have pulled it off. Instead, we get an ill-conceived exercise, which can’t figure out whether it wants to be liberal or conservative hogwash.
Dir: Catherine Cyran
Star: Tia Carrere, Lisa Dean Ryan, Tricia Leigh Fisher, Carlos Gómez