Also checked out the alleged comedy Gringo over the weekend. I say alleged comedy because the trailers said it was a comedy… and I’m not saying it tries to be funny but isn’t, I’m saying it’s only occasionally trying to be funny. But that’s ok since it’s a movie that’s 100% trying occasionally to be so many different things with so many occasional characters and plots, it might as well be a film put in a blender.
In theory, David Oyelowo (the British-born actor who played Martin Luther King in Selma) stars as a Nigerian-born immigrant living his worst-life in Chicago. He works in middle management for a pharmaceutical company, his wife is spending too much money on a consulting business with only one client. His bosses – Joel Edgerton and Charlize Theron – are selling their latest drug under-the-counter in Mexico to a Cartel. So when a merger with another pharmaceutical company is happening, the three pack up and head south of the border to stop the illicit sales. Oyelowo’s character is oblivious to the shenanigans and is largely being used as a dupe. Meanwhile, a young couple (including Amanda Seyfried) are hired to go to Mexico to smuggle some of these drugs across the border. Meanwhile, Edgerton and Theron are having an affair… with Edgerton also sleeping with Oyelowo’s wife (Thandie Newton) on the side. Also, when things go bad, Edgerton hires ex-mercenary Sharlto Copely to come to Mexico to help fix the problem. The Cartels are unhappy about their lost sales so identify Oyelowo as the Heffe, the gringo who is taking away their sales.
That’s a lot of cast and a lot of good actors in a lot of barely connected plots doing a lot of stuff that isn’t comedy but isn’t much of anything else either. None of it connects, some actors are off screen for thirty-forty minutes at a time, some storylines get ignored completely, and the movie never, ever, ever ends. It keeps going and going and oh lord, won’t it STOP!?! This is a very bad movie.
The sick, sad thing is Charlize Theron is so GOOD in the movie that I wanted a movie just about her amoral sociopath. She has some great scenes that barely connect to anything else in the movie but she’s playing them with such sick disregard for society and humanity, that you just want more of her being devilishly evil. But she’s in maybe fifteen minutes of this two hour movie.
Oyelowo, who is a good actor, is playing such a milquetoast nobody, it’s hard to root for him. He’s either bland and confused or he’s overacting bigtime in his few moments of random comedy. It’s also sad to say, while his natural English accent is immaculate, his Nigerian accent keeps slipping. It’s sad because his parents were Nigerians who immigrated to England so he’s likely borrowing their accent.
Nothing good or worth watching in his bland, messy, confusing disaster of a movie. A great cast can’t save something that won’t save itself. I won’t say it’s a garbage movie… I think they really thought they were making something unique. But something went terribly wrong in the direction, the edit, or who knows what.
Score: 57