Tag: c

Curvature

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★★★
“Time out for fun.”

Helen (Fonseca) is struggling to come to terms with the sudden, unexpected death of her scientist husband, who was engaged on a top-secret project with his partner, Tomas (Morshower). Then things get truly weird: she experiences the mother of all blackouts, missing an entire week, and shortly afterward, Helen receives a phone-call warning her to get out of her house… from herself. It turns out, husband and Tomas had come up with a limited form of time-travel. As a result of this and subsequent events, there are now two Helens running around this point in. And future Helen appears to be considerably more militant. She leaves present Helen a sniper rifle as a gift, as well as stocking up on things like pressure cookers – and you can safely assume she’s not preparing a nourishing casserole. Present Helen decides future Helen needs to be stopped. But the more she uncovers, not least about the circumstances of her husband’s demise, the more she understands why future Helen is intent on carrying out her take on Project Mayhem.

I love me a good time-travel movie, and this is just that – a good time-travel movie, rather than a great one, like Retroactive or Run Lola Run. It manages to keep its two heroines in the air, revealing information at a decent rate, and also to balance brain and brawn. To the latter end, the heroine has to solve puzzles left behind by her other self to clue her in – without doing so to Tomas or the others seeking to shut the Helens down. On her side is work colleague Alex (Avery), though to be honest, he seems there mostly as a proxy for the audience, so Helen can explain stuff to him. Against her is Kravitz (Lanipekun), a crypto-federal agent – for it seems the defense industry has its own plans for the technology in question. That said, if it were really all that important, you’d think more than one guy might be sent in pursuit. Whatevs….

A bonus point is awarded for gratuitously casting Linda Hamilton in a small role as Helen’s former mentor. For, of course, Hamilton was part of the original “Going to the past to save the future” franchise: Terminator. Here, she doesn’t get to do much; it’s still a nice nod to one of the film’s influences. However, it feels as if the film couldn’t quite work out how it wanted to use time-travel. There’s a nice get-out which explains why future Helen didn’t come back and prevent her husband’s death. But beyond that, it’s more mildly engaging than deeply engrossing, as one Helen gradually closes in on the other Helen, and Kravitz closes in on them both. To be honest, I’d rather have focused on future Helen, since she seems the one actively involved in changing the world, rather than reacting to it, as present Helen does. Though scripting that version might have caused too many headaches – both for the writer and the viewer.

Dir: Diego Hallivis
Star: Lyndsy Fonseca, Zach Avery, Glenn Morshower, Alex Lanipekun

Chase Step By Step

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★★★
“Chase what matters.”

A solid if unremarkable Taiwanese kung-fu film, it’s set in 1887 and focuses on a mission to deliver a thousand taels of gold, which are intended for use in drought relief by another province. (Presumably) To avoid attracting unwanted attention, the delivery is kept very low-key. In fact, only two people are assigned as security for the gold: circus acrobats Lin Ying (Hsu) and Sao Wu (Chow). However, word apparently leaks out, and on their journey, they’re almost perpetually under attack.

These attempts range from the straightforward – two guys they meet at a rest-stop try and run off with their cart – to the more subtle. The wife of an inn-keeper attempts to seduce Sao, for example. Or in the most complex, an incident is staged in which our hero and heroine rescue a young girl. She then invites him to dinner, gets him drunk and… Step 2. ? Step 3. PROFIT. Yeah, it’s a bit vague, since it’s not as if Sao is carrying the thousand taels of cold on him. Anyway, even when they reach their destination, the relief aid isn’t safe, since there are greedy local eyes, intent on diverting it into private hands.

It’s very much a two-hander, with Lin and Sao portrayed as equals, though the poster would indicate Hsu is the star (she’d go on to become a successful producer, including on the Oscar-nominated Farewell My Concubine). Less clear is quite what the relationship is between the pair: Sao seems to take the lead, but Lin is the smarter, and has to rescue her colleague more than once, in part due to his eye for the ladies. Fight-wise, Chow is the better: he gets the final battle against the man bad guy, while Hsu is battling the two minions who are absconding with the gold.

It’s a bit of a shame they don’t make more of the pair’s supposed circus and acrobatic background. This is the focus of the scene behind the opening credits (though quite what the dog tricks have to do with it, I’m uncertain!), then only intermittently references these skills thereafter. There’s a scene where the two have to escape by crossing a chasm on a tightrope, pushing a hand-cart, and a rather cool scene where Sao fights the bad guys while on a pair of impromptu stilts. That’s about it.

Lin does get the movie’s most memorable moment, however. Her opponent hurls a knife as she’s on the ground, which pins down her pigtail. With one flick of her head, she returns it to him, burying it in his chest. [Here’s the animated GIF] They say there’s nothing new under the sun: that kind of lethal hair-fu shows they’re wrong. In comparison, the rest of the film is not as memorable, and offers hardly much in the way of an inventive story-line. Yet it proceeds at a decent enough pace to sustain interest, and Hsu’s facial expressions sell her talents well – perhaps better than her talents do.

Dir: Yu Min Sheong
Star: Hsu Feng, Chow Chung-lim, Ma Cheung, Nam Wan

Hell on Route 666, by Dan Leissner

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

At the very end, of the characters says to Cat, the heroine, “Will someone PLEASE tell me what this was all about!” I can kinda sympathize with them: I think it’s safe to say this defied expectations, though I must stress, in a good way. It’s close to 12 years since we were first introduced to Cat; not sure what Dan has been doing in the interim, but I was delighted to find a second volume had finally arrived. Re-reading our review, I probably should have been less surprised: the original managed to have a plot combining “black militants, white supremacists and aliens from outer-space.” I had managed to forget the last, so was expecting merely another funky escapade of seventies style, sex and violence.

Yes… and no.

Initially, it seems almost like a cross between Dennis Wheatley and Russ Meyer, with Cat investigating and infiltrating a Satanic cult based around heavy metal group 666, whose teenage fans are being mind-controlled into committing increasingly heinous crimes in the name of the Devil. But the further on we go, the more outrageous things get. 666 are entirely discarded, with a Devil-worshipping rock-band becoming positively mundane. We end up heading for territory that’s more like the Book of Revelations adapted by H.P. Lovecraft – oh, yeah, and throw in a demonic version of Bumblebee from Transformers, because… Well, just because. Except, Lovecraft wouldn’t have a kick-ass heroine like Cat, breaking limbs and hearts with equal confidence. Or an all-girl commando platoon. Or quite so many pairs of tight jeans, inevitably worn low on the hips…

I did have some issues in the opening third, mostly because Cat wasn’t all that likeable, to be honest. Not sure if I’ve changed, she’s changed or the world has changed, in the twelve years since the first novel. Probably a bit of each. She seems to spent an inordinate amount of time stoned, dressing/acting to attract the male gaze, yet simultaneously resenting it. “Jeez! What a bunch of low-lives,” is a sentiment she expresses at one point; “Shit! Just look at them… bunch of no necks and beer-bellies. God, I hate this crap!” at another. Apparently, she’s the only one allowed to overtly express any sexuality. She certainly has no qualms about seducing a boy of “barely 16”. Reverse the genders there, and it would play rather differently, to be sure.

It was only later, I realized, perhaps this might be deliberate – expressing a darker side to Cat may be why the Satanists were so keen to bring her over to their team. However, I prefer my heroines a bit less… whiny! Still, even in this difficult first third, Leissner packs a wallop, particularly with his chilling descriptions of the mind-controlled terrorism. And the deeper we get, the more Cat relies on her actions to define her. That, and the continually escalating apocalypse make for a real downhill avalanche of a read, one that eventually becomes entirely unstoppable. Dan promises we won’t have to wait until 2031 for the next installment. He’d better live up to that, or I’ll be swinging past to know the reason why.

Author: Dan Leissner
Publisher: Midnight Marquee Press, available through Amazon, for now only as a paperback. I received a review copy in exchange for an honest opinion.
Book 2 of 2 in the Cool Cat series.

Cassidy Red

  By

★★½
“Better red than dead. Albeit, only just.”

Josephine “Joe” Cassidy (Eiland) is promised in marriage to Tom (Jenkins), the son of the area’s richest rancher, but her heart actually belongs to Jakob (Grasl), the Indian who is Tom’s adopted brother. The two lovers consummate their relationship when Tom is away, but  the spurned fiancee hatches a long-term plan to get revenge. Years later, after becoming the local sheriff, he uses these connections to frame and execute Jakob for murder. Word of this reaches Joe, who conveniently for the plot is handy with a firearm, because her father (Cramer) was a renowned bounty-hunter, and passed on the necessary skills to her. Dying her hair red – hence the title – she sets out to take revenge on Tom, only for him to reveal that Jakob is not dead… Not yet, anyway.

The structure here is quite convoluted – rather needlessly, I’d say. Not only does it unfold in several different eras, the entire thing is enclosed in wraparound sections, where the story of Cassidy Red is being told, for inspirational purposes, by a piano-player in a brothel to one of the working girls. It’s definitely a case where less feels like it would have been more, with a straightforward chronological timeline working to the film’s benefit, instead of characters dropping in and out. Perhaps the director felt that might have been too simple, for once you peel away the trapping, this is indeed a very straightforward tale of revenge. Is that necessarily a bad thing, though?

This was submitted for Knudsen’s thesis at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television, which perhaps explains some of the issues here: on occasion, it certainly does feels as if it was an academic requirement with an earnest Message (capital M used deliberately), rather than wanting to tell its story. The best section is likely the one where Joe is being taught the mechanics of gun-fighting by her father, which is very well written, performed and edited. The result is a sequence that sheds genuine light into the mindset of someone who, for survival, has to be permanently ready to shoot to kill. Given the limited budget here, credit is due for production values which are generally good. It was filmed largely on location at Old Tucson Studios, and that adds authenticity to the 19th-century Arizona setting, which some films wouldn’t have bothered with. 

Other parts, unfortunately, fall short of that, and some are flat-out unconvincing – the scene where Jakob is taken on board as a foster son, for example, seems entirely inexplicable, and they just shouldn’t have bothered, since it’s not something the audience needs to see. It’s a shame, since the central performance is good: however, the two male leads both struggle to be more than forgettable, and that leaves the end result feeling unbalanced on the dramatic level. This sporadic quality is perhaps the biggest problem: there seems a general unevenness of tone and approach, resulting in a film which takes two steps forward, then one back.

Dir: Matt Knudsen
Star: Abigail Eiland, David Thomas Jenkins, Jason Grasl, Rick Cramer

Contract: Snatch by Ty Hutchinson

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

Sei is a former assassin, who quit the industry after getting pregnant, then having her daughter stillborn. She has taken up a quiet life in the Belgian countryside, when she’s brought out of retirement by a shocking offer she received over the deep web. Her prospective employer says Sei’s daughter is not dead, and offers information in exchange for carrying out a job: breaking another assassin, the notorious Black Wolf, out of the Turkish prison where he is being held. After confirming with the doctor who was present that the claim of her daughter’s survival is true, Sei accepts the mission. However, it turns out she was set up as a patsy, and finds herself also incarcerated in conditions which seem not have improved much since Midnight Express.

It’s a little odd that Sei is described as an assassin, yet doesn’t actually do any actual… assassinating here. Sure, she certainly kills a lot of people, mostly members of Turkish law-enforcement (as well as a wild boar) – just not for money. Might have made more sense to begin by establishing Sei’s credentials in this profession; as is, the reader has to accept her skills on faith. Perhaps the vague hints of back-story should have been fleshed out more. There’s also a large debt to Kill Bill in the driving force of the story here: specifically, the end of Volume 1, when Bill says, “One more thing, Sofie. Is she aware her daughter is still alive?” To my great surprise – sorry, can’t find the sarcasm font – this element is left entirely unresolved at the end of the volume. Indeed, she’s little if any closer to finding the truth than when she leaves the doctor.

While I’ve qualms about the overall structure here, I did actually enjoy the meat of the sandwich more than the bread. That would be the mission to Turkey, including her initial attempt to free the Black Wolf, then Sei’s subsequent escape from incarceration and flight across the country, with evil prison governor, General Rakin Demir, leading an extremely hot pursuit. It’s a crisply paced saga of action sequences, that have an interesting variety to them, from her compromised attempt to free the Black Wolf, through to a climactic race from Cesme across the Chios Strait to Greece. While she’s mostly a solo operator, who prefers to rely on stealth, she ends up teaming with Kostas, a Greek who… well, let’s just say, his connections come in handy, and I predict, likely will do so again in future volumes.

As the review to this point should make clear, I’m in two minds about whether I’ll be going further, because certain elements I liked and others I didn’t. Sei’s a good character, and I appreciated the almost complete lack of romance to get in the way of the “good stuff.” But I get the feeling the saga of her daughter is going to be stretched out beyond the point of tolerance, to deceased equine level. Probably one of those cases where I’ll wait for volume two to be available at a discounted price.

Author: Ty Hutchinson
Publisher: Gangkruptcy Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 5 in the Sei Assassin Thriller series.

Code Name: Griffin, by Morgan Hannah MacDonald

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

A painfully clunky mix of spy and crime thrillers, this really needs to decide which it wants to be. Alexandria Kingston – code name Griffin, in case you hadn’t guessed – was an abused child, with the good fortune to be rescued and brought up by Margaret Murphy, the head of Irish organized crime in Boston. Though to avoid Alex being targeted for leverage, she was never acknowledged to be part of the family. As an adult, Alex joined the CIA and became a top field agent, jet-setting over the globe on demand. But when her foster mother suffers a stroke, she returns to Boston to find herself in the middle of a war for control of the turf. The rival Killeen clan, sensing an opportunity, pounce. It’s up to Alex and her brothers to defend the family – and then take the battle to the Killeens.

It’s all utterly implausible. Apparently, the CIA don’t bother doing any kind of background check on their employees, and have no problem recruiting and giving security clearance to people with close ties to organized crime. Alex, meanwhile, wobbles uncertainly between remarkable proficiency and incompetence, as necessary to the plot. She can reel in a member of the Killeen family by simply ordering a whisky, yet this top-notch spy inexplicably can’t form sentences when faced with her former childhood sweetheart. I admit her latter burbling is actually kinda endearing, but c’mon: have some consistency in your lead character. And, of course, the Murphys are an almost saintly crime family. By which I mean, they still do prostitution and human trafficking, they just do them the right way. Yeah. About that…

This still might have made for an interesting detour in an established series, if we were already fully convinced of her talents as a CIA operative, with an unrevealed past. Instead, we get barely a handful of pages at the beginning to establish her credentials, with no real context: she exists in a vacuum. There’s also a fondness for the kind of florid consumerist prose I thought had gone out of style with Bret Easton Ellis culminating in this remarkably superfluous description of Alex’s perfume: “The sensuous bottom notes of Sri Lankan sandalwood and Indonesian patchouli were mixed with high notes of Bulgarian rose and citrus to add a feminine touch that was irresistible to the opposite sex.” I swear, I literally rolled my eyes at “high notes of Bulgarian rose”.

I can’t knock the action too much. There is a steady stream of set-pieces throughout the book, and MacDonald does describe these with a clear eye, and no shortage of savagery. [You wonder what, exactly, Boston law enforcement are doing while all this is going on, since Alex does not mess around, and the pile of bodies left in her wake is considerable. It just needs to be in the service of a much better constructed plot.

Author: Morgan Hannah MacDonald
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Griffin series.

Critical Salvage, by Steve Richer

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

This is briskly functional rather than particularly memorable: by which I mean, I read the book in fairly short order… only to discover, when I finished it, that I didn’t remember very much about it. Not even the heroine’s name. Mallory? Mindy? Miley? Definitely an M word… Ah, yes: Melody Cale. She’s an agent for the Geirty Solutional Diversity Group, a murky government organization – also known as the Get Shit Done Group – who “do what the CIA couldn’t… without having politicians, or reporters, looking over their shoulders.”

In this case, it’s cleaning up after a CIA operation goes wrong, and a plane goes down in the Nicaraguan jungle. The cargo, code-named “Woodland Kaiser”, needs to be recovered before it falls into the wrong hands. Which would be these of The Homestead, an equally murky group of unknown origins and motives. They contract out the search to murky [yeah, it’s like that…] Latin American drug-lord, Rojas. The GSDG send Melody, and she teams up with Owen Wright, a British ex-soldier whose father was killed by one of Rojas’s minions, and who is much more interested in revenge than a salvage operation.

Indeed, Melody appears more interested in finding out the identity of Rojas then recovering the target. It’s not long before she has abandoned the search for Woodland Kaiser entirely, not to mention the entire American continent. She is instead hob-nobbing with the rich and famous, jetting off to the Cannes Film Festival, for reasons which remain – all together, now! – murky. This is particularly dubious since, it turns out, when Owen puts his mind to it, he’s able to locate the crash site in about a page. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you? You know, for a second there…

If you put issues of logic and common sense aside, this works much better, and it’s ideal beach material: a slick page-turner, in which bullets fly and the villain has a seaside lair nicknamed “The Aquarium”, with one glass wall below the water-level, looking out into the ocean. [Memo to self: if ever I become an evil overlord, and construct anywhere nicknamed “The Aquarium,” I will be sure to use bullet-proof materials…] This is involved in the best section, forming the book’s climax, when the stronghold is stormed by Melody, with the assistance of Adriana Tiscareno, a businesswoman she initially suspects of being “Rojas”.

The heroine is something of a cypher. It might have been nice to have learned more about her origins, and how she became such a hard-ass. For comparison, the blurb claims “Fans of Atomic Blonde, Nikita and Alias will love Critical Salvage” – two of those three did explain how their heroines came to be, and those were important parts of the story. While this ties up all its loose ends nicely, and works perfectly well as a stand-alone, it perhaps feels more like a third or fourth book, rather than an introduction. But if I’m in need of some holiday reading down the stretch, future volumes would merit consideration.

Author: Steve Richer
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback
Book 1 of 1 in the Mercury Cale series.

Cold November

  By

★★★
“Deer Florence…”

If you think children are of one mind with regard to the gun debate, thanks to the zealots of Marjory Stoneman, the alternative view portrayed by this movie will feel amazingly transgressive and almost alien. The world it depicts is one where schools will actually teach kids how to use guns safely, handing out gun permits, and a teenage girl can receive a treasured family heirloom, in the shape of a .30-30 rifle, passed down the generations. Hunting is a way of life, and an important resource, with a particularly strong matriarchal tradition, in which three generations of women will be going into the woods together. For 12-year-old Florence (Abas), it’ll be her first excursion: in a not-too-subtle parallel, she also gets her first period.

This is a very sober film, which takes guns and the culture around them extremely seriously, and that includes hunting, which is depicted in unflinching fashion. This is likely not a film for the committed vegan, in particular when Florence has shot her first deer and, in the absence of any immediate adult help, has to dress it. This is foreshadowed earlier, Florence’s aunt Mia (Fellner) teasing her when the young girl gets a bit squeamish about menstrual blood (and in particular, its uses in hunting): “You think that’s gross? Wait until you get elbows deep inside a deer.” As someone who tends to encounter raw meat only on polystyrene trays in the supermarket, it’s quite a shock – albeit also refreshing – to be reminded from where it comes.

On the other hand, the naturalistic approach eventually hampers the film, simply because so little of note actually happens. Up until the end, when Florence finds herself alone in the woods for a bit, virtually the sole bit of excitement is a small fire breaking out in the tree stand. This is not exactly an adrenaline rush. In Jacob’s defense, it’s clearly not intended to be: according to the director on the film’s Kickstarter page, “I noticed how the power of taking a life, butchering an animal, and meditating through the act was empowering. It changes you. It seemed clear that those who had not lived through this change have a fundamentally different experience of life.” However, quite what that “change” might be for Florence is not clear. How is her life “fundamentally different” as a result? We don’t really know.

The main difference seems to be that Florence is no longer visited by the ghost of Sweeney, her late sibling. This is another time the film’s opacity is a bit irritating: it’s suggested that Sweeney’s death was tragic, and perhaps even firearm-related. But would it have been too much to ask, for the film-makers to be a little clearer, on what appears to be an important point? Despite these criticisms, while it’s probably not a film I’d watch again, I didn’t feel it was 90 minutes wasted. Very much understated, this provides a glimpse into an environment not often depicted by Hollywood, one where guns are a tool, and not a threat.

Dir: Karl Jacob
Star: Bijou Abas, Anna Klemp, Heidi Fellner, Karl Jacob

Cattle Annie and Little Britches

  By

★★★
“All legends end in bullshit.”

One of the subjects here almost lived long enough to see her story on the big screen: the woman who was Cattle Annie passed away only three years before the movie version was released in April 1981. Playing her was the daughter of Christopher Plummer, Amanda, in her screen debut (she already had stage experience off-Broadway), while the role of Little Britches went to another near-newcomer who would also go on to fame in her own right, Diane Lane. It was based on Robert Ward’s book – he co-wrote the screen-play – and seems to take a fairly fast and loose approach to the facts of the pair’s lives. Though given the huge uncertainty involved in those, it’s hard to complain too much.

For example, rather than being born and brought up in Oklahoma, the duo are portrayed as making their way out to California to seek their fortune, when they’re forcibly detoured to Guthrie, OK, There, they encounter Bill Doolin (Lancaster) when he and his gang visit the town. Annie falls for gang member Bittercreek Newcomb (John Savage) and they end up being taken by him to the gang’s hideout. Their knowledge of the Doolin Gang is entirely based on the embellished stories they’ve heard about them, and they’re disappointing to find reality comes up short.

The man they encounter, and whose gang they join, is considerably older than the real person. Lancaster was 67 at the time, while Doolin was in his late thirties. The girls are also played significantly older: 23 during filming, Plummer was a full decade older than the real Cattle Annie. The cinematic Doolin seems increasingly weary of the whole outlaw thing, of being pursued by the relentless Bill Tilghman (Steiger), and has little or no interest in living up to his own mythology when he meets the pair. But Cattle Annie’s belief in the legend, at least somewhat reignites the fire. Though after his capture, Doolin returns to fatalism, and it’s up to the girls to stage a rescue mission, when the rest of the gang would just let their leader hang.

You get something of the hardscrabble life about the pair, and how the outlaw life is one of the few routes by which they could escape their grinding poverty. As Annie says after their failed initial attempt to follow Doolin, “I’ll not be a white nigger slave woman! I’d rather burn like a fire!” But there isn’t an enormous amount going on, and the film seems to contain a fair bit of filler, such as an impromptu game of baseball, using equipment looted during a train robbery [As a baseball fan, seems doubtful the entire group of adult men would be so oblivious of the sport as they appear. This was the mid 1890’s: the National League had been running for close to 20 years, with a team in St. Louis, one state over] Though as a meditation on the dying embers of the “Wild West,” and the gap between heroic fiction and slogging through endless rain and mud, it’s effective enough, and you can see why both young leads would go on to greater fame.

Dir: Lamont Johnson
Star: Amanda Plummer, Diane Lane, Burt Lancaster, Rod Steiger

Cocaine Godmother

  By

★★½
“A slice of Welsh rarebit”

As we mentioned in the 2018 preview, this has had a rather tortuous journey to the screen, with Zeta-Jones inked to the part of Griselda Blanco as long ago as October 2014. That theatrical film appears to have died on the vine, but the actress’s interest clearly did not. Last May, Lifetime gave the go-ahead to a TV movie version instead, telling the life story of a character who has already crossed this site before. Needless to say, there were howls of indignation from the usual quarters that the Welsh Zeta-Jones had been cast to play Blanco, though as she herself pointed out, she’d played Hispanic women before, such as in Zorro. It’s something which never bothers me: whether the performance works is always more important to me than the location of the performer’s birth.

In this case (and going by the Twitter reactions, many tend to agree), I’d say that Zeta-Jones certainly wasn’t the problem with the finished product. If considerably more attractive than the real Griselda, she is mostly very convincing, giving her portrayal the combination of driven intensity and potential for furious rage that Blanco possessed. The problem is more a script which simply fails to flow. Sure, the story touches most of the obvious moments in Griselda’s life, yet these appear completely unconnected to each other. The end result feels almost as if someone took a 70-episode telenovela and edited it down into a 90-minute TV movie. It’s more like Griselda Blanco’s Greatest Hits – and she was allegedly responsible for over 200 of those, hohoho.

It is a disturbing start, with the very young Blanco being pimped out by her mother in Medellin, only to pull a gun and shoot one of her customers dead after he refuses to pay. Damn. Thereafter, however, it bounces around rapidly, with little or no real time-frame. You get her killing husbands, inventing the motorcycle drive-by, the Dadeland Mall shootout, using attractive women to smuggle drugs in their lingerie and high-heels, etc. But all these fragments combine to provide little or no insight into her character, motives or personality (though I was somewhat impressed this did not soft-pedal Blanco’s bisexuality, unlike La Viuda Negra); I wanted to know what made her tick, and was sorely disappointed. You’d likely come away better informed simply by reading the Wikipedia article on her.

Perhaps it’s the kind of life which simply cannot be told adequately in such a brief time-span. I saw a number of comparisons to the Netflix series, Narcos, and do have to wonder if a 13-episode series might have been better suited to the material, rather than this breathless, and ultimately empty, gallop through Blanco’s life. There is still reported to be another take on the topic coming down the pipeline with Jennifer Lopez playing Blanco in an HBO movie. Like Zeta-Jones, Lopez had been linked to the role for a long time (since at least the death of the real Griselda in 2012), but little has been heard about that version since 2016. For now, this version will have to do.

Dir: Guillermo Navarro
Star: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Raúl Méndez, Juan Pablo Espinosa, Matteo Stefan