This film transits common places without having anything new to say except that it urgently wants to up the grittiness ante -- which, much to my annoyance, it seldom succeeded in doing. This is a film that desperately wants to pull all stops in bleakness and wholesale desperation, and in filmmaking the last thing you should do is having the audience notice your intentions beforehand. A project of this sort demanded a director with more guts and nothing to lose and Urbizu doesn't seem to be the man.
Coronado's job is excellent but it cannot rescue this film on its own from a comfortable zone of correct mediocrity. His fatalistic mien, coupled with a devil-may-care nihilism and a teeming rage which his character makes little effort in choking back, makes him altogether a train wreck waiting to happen.
And happen it does, but the rest of the film falls short of his performance. Urbizu's style still needs a lot of polishing. Dialogues still seem forced and theatrical to the point of haphazard, totally at odds with the naturalistic tone his protagonists demand. Supporting characters are either poorly developed or handed out to the wrong actors: Juanjo Artero just switches the automatic pilot on his TV police procedural role, and Helena Miquel may be a very good singer but is totally out of place in a "serious" film project such as this.
The film's middle part is protracted to the point of boredom. It ends up leaving more things unexplained than it should care to, and eventually sacrifices whatever interest the audience might have for the characters in the altar of narrative sparsity. It does throw the barbs at institutional incompetence we would expect considering its subject matter, but the tameness with which it does betrays the overall bitterness deliberately pursued by the project.
The terrorist subplot is omnipresent though not overbearing; it is, however, ostensibly calculated to give the film the extra mileage worth of "cinema vérité" bleakness and tragic tone which character development alone seemed unable to achieve. In that respect, it seems aimed at boosting the film's appeal to the audience, and as such it verges on the exploitative. From the artistic point of view, Urbizu didn't need such a cheap ancillary plot device, but I understand it will pay off for him commercially.
Coronado's job is excellent but it cannot rescue this film on its own from a comfortable zone of correct mediocrity. His fatalistic mien, coupled with a devil-may-care nihilism and a teeming rage which his character makes little effort in choking back, makes him altogether a train wreck waiting to happen.
And happen it does, but the rest of the film falls short of his performance. Urbizu's style still needs a lot of polishing. Dialogues still seem forced and theatrical to the point of haphazard, totally at odds with the naturalistic tone his protagonists demand. Supporting characters are either poorly developed or handed out to the wrong actors: Juanjo Artero just switches the automatic pilot on his TV police procedural role, and Helena Miquel may be a very good singer but is totally out of place in a "serious" film project such as this.
The film's middle part is protracted to the point of boredom. It ends up leaving more things unexplained than it should care to, and eventually sacrifices whatever interest the audience might have for the characters in the altar of narrative sparsity. It does throw the barbs at institutional incompetence we would expect considering its subject matter, but the tameness with which it does betrays the overall bitterness deliberately pursued by the project.
The terrorist subplot is omnipresent though not overbearing; it is, however, ostensibly calculated to give the film the extra mileage worth of "cinema vérité" bleakness and tragic tone which character development alone seemed unable to achieve. In that respect, it seems aimed at boosting the film's appeal to the audience, and as such it verges on the exploitative. From the artistic point of view, Urbizu didn't need such a cheap ancillary plot device, but I understand it will pay off for him commercially.