Movie starts with a drunk Spanish detective. We're in Spain, so the Spanish part makes sense. The place where he's drinking finally convinces him to leave. He's out driving around and he spots another bar that might be open, so he stops in. It's five in the morning, they are closed but the front door is open because they are cleaning up. People talk, yes, no, yes, no, give the detective a drink, and then boom, boom, boom! The detective shoots the three employees dead. This guy is a loose cannon, in the very literal sense. Now he realizes what he has done and that there might be somebody upstairs who witnessed this and he better kill them too if he doesn't want to hang. Our hidden witness manages to clobber our drunk cannon with a frying pan and escape. Merde!
At this point I'm wondering about this movie. This guy is obviously a shit, a dog who should be put down, but at this point he's the only one left alive besides our unknown witness. So, the detective starts trying to track down the one guy who can hang a murder rap on him.
Meanwhile the cops are investigating a triple homicide at a strip club (yes, same bar, same dead people). All kinds of interesting little bits of information turn up. The owner was previously indicted from trafficking in narcotics. The bouncer is an arab hitman wanted by Interpol for murder in umpteen different countries. The bartender was from Colombia, and we all know what that means. I won't mention the 300,000 Euros in a fancy safe with the electronic combination lock that was opened for the police by a man with a stethoscope. Hey, it could happen. Some people can hear transistors changing state.
Mr. loose cannon is breaking into people's businesses and apartments and making slow but steady progress on tracking down his next victim. But wait, there's something funny going on, with this guy. He's going around meeting strange people, carrying a backpack. This guy is beginning to look more like a drug smuggler than an accountant for a strip club, or maybe he's more like a terrorist. I mean, just what are these guys doing?
Meanwhile, our beautiful, female judge (judges seem to run investigations in Spain and Argentina, or maybe it's just an artifact of translation) and mother is pursuing her investigation of the triple homicide. Seems the old narcotics investigation was handed over to the foreign service because of a possible terrorist connection. When that didn't pan out it fell in a hole. Boy, we've got some smarmy characters playing the well insulated bureaucrats. Big smiles to go with their tall tales.
Naturally, since our judge is an intelligent, loyal and dedicated public servant (never mind a wife and mother), her investigation eventually runs across Santos, our loose cannon. He admits to do doing his job but otherwise lies through his teeth.
Things finally come to a head and Santos takes a shotgun and goes calling at El Hacienda de Terroristos. Bloody mayhem ensues and Santos goes to his just (?) reward. Perhaps god will look favorably on him since all the people he killed were scumbags of the first order.
Sometimes I wonder if it is a good idea to include technical details of devious schemes in movies. It does make the movie more believable, and they aren't giving anything away that an intelligent person could not figure out for themselves, but should we really be handing do-it-yourself plans for mass murder to every moron with a theater ticket? On the other hand, maybe the value of educating the well behaved majority about the possible hazards present in modern life outweighs the risks.
IMDB has this to say about this film (sort of): A thriller about police ineptitude prior to Madrid's 2004 terrorist bombing.
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