Directed by:
Juan Carlos FresnadilloScreenplay:
Andrés M. KoppelCinematography:
Xavi GiménezComposer:
Lucio GodoyCast:
Leonardo Sbaraglia, Eusebio Poncela, Mónica López, Antonio Dechent, Max von Sydow, Guillermo Toledo, Alber Ponte, Jesús Noguero, Chema de Miguel (more)Plots(1)
The film begins and ends in the Canary Islands, where ringleader Sam (Max von Sydow), a Holocaust survivor, runs a casino. His right-hand man Federico (Eusebio Poncela) is stripped of "the gift" in a terrifying exchange that Federico sees as worse than death: Sam hugs him and in doing so steals his luck away. Desperate for revenge, Federico latches onto Tomas (Leonard Sbaraglia), the miraculous sole survivor of an airplane crash. He convinces Tomas to test his luck in various games (one involves running full-speed, blindfolded, through a heavily wooded forest to see if he is "lucky" enough to avoid running into a tree.) By training Tomas to be a winner, Federico hopes to eventually have him challenge Sam. Thrown into the complicated mix are an untouchable bullfighter (Antonio Dechent), and an auto accident survivor (Monica Lopez) who want to break up this obsessive gambling ring. (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (3)
Well, the desire to go jogging in the woods pretty much passed me by, but not so much because of THAT scene as because this film was so tedious that it made me disinclined to do any other activity. It's a shame that only the premise was took off to the skies of originality and not the rest.
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Fresnadillo is talented, no question about it. Yet I didn't understand that until I saw his next film. I don't see how 28 Weeks Later can be brimming with utterly brilliant momentum when this first feature is based on a great idea that's buried by an incredibly dead pace and a complete lack of empathy for all the characters. The day after watching it, all I remember is the famous sprint through the forest, which is too little for 105 minutes.
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It is a great pity that such a promising thriller concept, which could have been used in almost any genre (especially sci-fi, which would suit it the most), has been diluted into a surprisingly uninteresting drama, where the viewer can only dream about interesting characters. I was particularly bothered by the screenwriter's impersonal approach to the characters throughout the first half, as a result of which the catharsis did not feel like a culmination, but rather as a liberation from boredom. From experience, we know that a good mystery thriller can be created in Spanish conditions, but this case certainly is not one of them.
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