★★★½
“Poles apart, once more.”
I was enormously surprised to see this one pop up on Netflix – it’s not as if the first movie is available on the platform (at least, not in the US), which you would expect to limit the market for the sequel. Perhaps it’s tied into the director’s recent, impressive feature, The Plagues of Breslau having been bought by the streaming service, and packaged as a Netflix original? This isn’t quite at the same level. Parts of it are awesome, alternating between hysterically funny and savagely brutal, in a way that feels like a Polish version of a Guy Ritchie film. But there are too many disparate stories here: I could fill the rest of the standard 500 words of length with the various synopses. And this leaves the good ones feeling a bit under-developed, while the less interesting ones – though never boring – come across more as a distraction.
To be honest, I don’t remember many of the details of its predecessor, but that shouldn’t impact viewers here too much. The main new character is actually Colombian. Aida (Cepeda) is involved in a deal for a ton of coke with the Poles under Daria (Dygant), that goes badly wrong. Aida ends up in Poland on a mission to find and punish those responsible. There’s also Stella (Grabowska), the mobster’s daughter who takes a dislike to Aida after she hooks up with her father. Tangentially, we have the glory of the scatterbrained Anna (Warnke), who starts off in prison, but ends up becoming a best-selling author, via a stint as a checkout girl. She’s the best character here, even though I can see how she might be highly irritating to some viewers. Finally, there’s Siekiera, who is in North Africa, and ends up getting radicalized, to become a suicide bomber back in Poland.
Did I miss anyone? Probably. As the above suggests, there are about five different films here, of wildly varying tone and content, all fighting for dominance. They don’t always mesh well, yet the style does help make it less jarring than it could be: it does feel like they all take part in the same universe. As the poster suggests, there’s no shortage of violence on view here, and much like Plagues, this is not for the squeamish. In particular, there is enthusiastic wielding of chainsaws, not leas by Aida. But there’s also a brutal interrogation sequence, which is capped off with a file being used on the victim’s teeth. You won’t be laughing at the end of that. And neither will he.
The promise at the end if that the Women of Mafia will return, and for one, I would not mind. However, it feels like Vega has so many stories he wants to tell, that the extended canvas offered by a television series might be a better way to give them the room they both need and deserve, in order to blossom. At least, give Anna her own show. That, I would certainly watch.
Dir: Patryk Vega
Star: Angie Cepeda, Agnieszka Dygant, Aleksandra Grabowska, Katarzyna Warnke