Walking A Fine Line

The Viva Spanish & Latin American Film Festival is, like In The City and more recently, Manchester International Festival, part of the fabric of Manchester's cultural life. Part of the fabric of my cultural life too - I've covered nine of the 16 festivals for Metro.

It kicked off last night with Solo Quiero Caminar. There was something massively reminiscent about this Spanish/Mexican revenge thriller and it was only after a little Google searching afterwards that I worked out why - it's a loose follow-up to the very similar Nadie Hablara Con Nosotras Cuando Hayamos Muerto, which I saw at the 2003 festival.

The neat twist in Solo Quiero Caminar is that it's the women who are the bad guys. Well, the bad guys are bad guys too - drug dealers in fact - but when one of the four women marries head honcho Felix (for no apparent reason beyond plot development) and immediately works out that he's a wife-beating good-for-nothing, her three accomplices work out a way of fighting her corner. And that's by robbing Felix of nearly all his money via increasingly audacious schemes.

Solo Quiero Caminar is, with qualification, good fun. It has a Reservoir Dogs meets The A Team feel, never takes itself too seriously (which is probably for the best seeing as one of the women has her hand graphically hammered into a pulp) and in Gabriel, the second in command, it does at least have a character searching for some sort of redemption. It's his face on the poster, above.

But it's seriously undone by some really baggy plotting. You never get the sense of why these women robbers turned to crime in the first place, but more grievously, barely anyone is believable. One has a son she clearly loves, but nonsensically drops his essay off to his teacher rather than get the medical help that would probably prevent him from being an orphan. Another gets the angle grinder out to construct a lock-breaking gun that doubles as a bike which she somehow transports to Mexico without anyone blinking an eyelid. I was half expecting BA Baracus himself to pull up in his black van and take her to the gangsters' lair.

Essentially it's ridiculous - but there aren't enough laughs for this to be a satisfying send up of the genre. Instead, it kind of falls between the cracks - not really nasty enough to be really arresting, not gritty enough to feel realistic, and not pacey enough to mask its obvious flaws.

Oddly, almost exactly the same criticisms were made of Nadie Hablara... a film made in 1996 which clearly referenced Pulp Fiction's in the way it sent up gangsters rather than lionised them. So it's slightly depressing that director Agustin Diaz Yanez appears to have learnt little in the 14 years since.

The words on Gabriel's face in the poster above translate as 'love is more dangerous than revenge'. That subtext does exist in Solo Quiero Caminar but only as an afterthought - and actually, more of that storyline may have made this uneven film work a whole lot better.