Smoke & Mirrors

SMOKE & MIRRORS by Alberto Rodriguez - TRAILER
Smoke & Mirrors is a 2016 Spanish film based on the 2006 non-fiction book Paesa, el espía de las mil caras (The Spy with a Thousand Faces) by Manuel Cerdán. The film tells the story of Francisco Paesa, a former agent of the Spanish secret service who faked his own death after an infamous corruption scandal. On Netflix in Spanish with English subtitles.

This isn't a great movie. We see a bunch of people wandering around, going to meetings, having drinks, passing envelopes back and forth, but I never got a feel for what was going on. I mean, are these good guys or bad guys? We have some corrupt government officials who are also doing some good things. Should we be upset that they are corrupt, or upset because they are getting screwed over? Or should be happy that they are getting away with the money? It's all very wishy-washy.

Spoilers follow.

Paco (Francisco Paesa) starts out as the head of the government's anti-terrorist squad. He buys a couple of SAM's (Surface to Air Missiles, i.e. anti-aircraft missiles), plants some homing beacons in the missiles and then sells them to the Basque terrorist group ETA. This bit of skulduggery allows him to track the missles and so bust the ETA. We only get a couple of lines in passing that elude to this whole operation. It's kind of typical of the whole film. There are big things going on, but they are all happening somewhere else. All we get is a couple of clues dropped in the middle of a conversation. Anyway, the government had promised him a big reward for busting the ETA, but they reneged on their promise and then tried to prosecute him for something.

Luis Roldán was the director general of the Spanish Civil Guard. He embezzled about $12 million. He didn't feel guilty about this as everyone else was doing it too, and he wasn't too worried about getting caught because he had evidence about the criminal activities of other officials. That didn't save him though. He spent 15 years in prison.

Supposedly, Luis gave the $12 million to Paco to hold for him while he dealt with the government's prosecution, but Paco 'died' and the money disappeared. Who knows what happened to the 'evidence'?

There were a couple of bits con-artistry. One was where Paco recruits a couple of bums to pose as big wheels for some bogus real estate transactions. That was kind of a standard scam. There was another that was kind of impressive for it's complexity, but baffling because why would you go to all the bother?

Paco negotiates Luis' surrender to the Spanish authorities. Luis has been hiding in Paris for a year, but for some reason Paco wants to make it look like Luis has been in Laos, so he generates some fake documents and hires a couple of guys to pose as Laotian policemen for the handoff to the Spanish cops at the airport in Bangkok, Thailand.

All this makes Spanish politics look awful, but I don't know if it's any worse than what we have here. The ETA seems to have been dissolved so maybe things are getting better.