Gringo

It isn’t entirely common for me to find a film that I’ve got a hard time manifesting my thoughts for.  I’m thinking mother! immediately after watching it, maybe Red Sparrow?  (For the sake of it, the latter is pretty good, a bit of a pot-boiler of an espionage thriller, but the trailers are a tad misleading (they made it seem decidedly more action-packed, when that aspect was refreshingly subdued), and the up-front use of nudity/sexuality didn’t seem to have much purpose beyond titillation.)  But Gringo genuinely left me wondering a bit.

Killer poster, though, right?

So let’s start with the plot, shall we?  We follow Harold, a middle manager at a pharmaceutical company, who, despite doing what he’s told and working hard, doesn’t get nearly the right amount of recognition he deserves.  His boss and friend, Richard, takes advantage of him, his wife is leaving him due to an affair (with Richard, no less!), his other boss disrespects him, and he suspects he’s about to be laid off as part of a business merger that will enrich his bosses.  So, on a business trip to Mexico, he fakes his own kidnapping, hoping his company’s insurance policy will net him a few million.  Meanwhile, a drug muling gig is about to go down involving stolen pills from Harold’s company’s manufacturer (they make synthetic/concentrated marijuana pills, y’see), but it and the company’s off-the-record dealings with local cartel figures collide in violence, eventually resulting in Harold’s actual kidnapping.  All the while, Harold has to figure out how to get free, his bosses deal with both the kidnapping and the merger, and several lives are hanging in the balance.  It’s a sliver monkey’s fist-ish, but at no point did I find myself confused, so there’s a plus.  The farce-style plot continuously throws misunderstandings and twists at you, forming several contiguous scenes of dark humor.

The thing is, though I recognized the situations before me as being humorous, I rarely found myself actually laughing.  It was more of a “Hey, that’s funny” rumination before moving on.  I was pleased throughout, I should say, but I’d be straining to say it was truly “funny”.  This is to be expected to a degree, at least, given the deliberately dark tone, but I can’t help but feel a bit let down, ultimately.  Still, there was never a point where I was either bored or dismayed.  I guess I can only describe my reaction with a shrug and “It’s pretty good”.

On a technical level, things are fine.  The director, Nash Edgerton (star Joel’s brother), does well with the intertwined storylines, and a decently high level of energy is maintained throughout, an impressive feat given that I only see one proper cinematic directing credit on his CV (he’s mostly worked in stunts, it looks).  The script’s balance between harsh situations and dark slapstick likely comes from the writing duo, which comprises Matthew Stone (previously known for Intolerable Cruelty, Big Trouble, and the Tommy Lee Jones Man of the House) and Anthony Tambakis (whose credits include Warrior and Jane Got a Gun).  David Oyelowo (a former Dr. King in Selma and King of Botswana in A United Kingdom) does rather well as the constantly put-upon loser Harold (think Steve Martin in Planes, Trains & Automobiles without the nastiness), bringing the right amounts of sympathetic charm and haplessness to keep the audience on his side.  Joel Edgerton and Charlize Theron do well enough as Harold’s bosses, but the former too often opts for a misbalanced character see-sawing between overconfident and overly-stupid, and the latter is stuck behind the single character trait of using her sexuality to get ahead in life.  Neither is bad (thankfully, given their shaky trailer clips), but at the same time neither does anything of great note.  Sharlto Copley is fairly delightful as a mercenary of sorts sent in to rescue Harold, but he’s kind of underused.  And Thandie Newton and Amanda Seyfried, playing Harold’s (ex-)wife and the drug mule’s girlfriend, respectively, are thoroughly wasted, given nothing much to do in a script that, as it’s one major flaw, has no idea what to do with its female characters beside looking pretty and serving as props in the story.

So, yeah, there’s stuff to like, some minor stuff not to like.  In the end, I find myself unable to make much noise in either direction.  I suppose I’ll say that if the story or cast sounds appealing, it’d be worth a watch, but I’d hesitate to get your hopes too high.  Or too low, for that matter.  It’s a fine film, a pretty good film, and that’s really all there is to it for me.