Star-studded cast can’t save trite and charmless genre piece 100 años de perdón
It’s a rainy morning in Valencia, Spain. A group of masked thieves led by El Uruguayo (Rodrigo de la Serna) and El Gallego (Luis Tosar) is about to rob the headquarters of a well-known international bank. They are supposed to break into a large number of the safe deposit boxes and then escape via a tunnel dug to join the bank’s building with an abandoned subway station. In theory, it was to be an easy heist with no consequences.
But as the plan unfolds, the truth is that the thieves are truly looking for one particular safe deposit box where Gonzalo Soriano, a former member of the government now in a coma as a result of an accident, had left noteworthy documents with compromising information.
What’s even more worrisome is that only El Uruguayo knows what their real mission is, and when his comrades begin to suspect he hasn’t told them the whole truth, their carefully constructed plan starts to go awry. All the more so when the tunnel they were supposed to use to flee is flooded by heavy rain. Now, they have no choice but to stay in the building with a group of hostages. Soon enough, the police will be on their way and their confrontation is not going to be pretty.
100 años de perdón, directed by Spanish director Daniel Calparsoro and starring Argentine actors Rodrigo de la Serna, Luciano Cáceres and Joaquín Furriel together with Spanish actors Luis Tosar, José Coronado, and Marian Álvarez, is a bank-robbery-movie-with-a-twist that despite being reasonably well crafted, it still doesn’t bring anything new to an already overworked subgenre. Yes, you have the social and political backdrop, meaning Spain’s ongoing economic crisis, which is of some interest. And yet it’s just a backdrop and nothing else. There are no insights or explorations here that lead to something else.
As regards the heist plot itself, let’s just say it’s rather dull and mechanical. You can see a lot coming from a mile away and what you can’t predict isn’t that interesting either. It’s as if the screenwriter had watched several bank robbery movies and then cooked up some kind of mélange that bears no personal imprint. Some action sequences are well-shot, granted, and there’s some sort of suspense from time to time. But that’s it. Genre cinema stuff, but done without charm or wit.
On the plus side, it should be noted that De la Serna’s performance is gripping enough to keep you watching the film, for the most part. For that matter, Tosar also does a very good job, even though the subplot involving him and the bank’s director rings false by all accounts. It’s a shame that the character played by Furriel doesn’t have more screen time to flesh it up better and the same goes for the character played by Cáceres, who is virtually inexistent.
But then this shouldn’t be that much of a surprise considering that many co-productions with remiss screenwriters go for big names in an attempt to make up for what they lack in substance. And it never really works.
Production notes
100 años de perdón (Argentina, Spain, France, 2016). Directed by Daniel Calparsoro. Written by Jorge Guerricaechevarría. With Rodrigo de la Serna, Luis Tosar, Joaquín Furriel, Luciano Cáceres, Raúl Arévalo, Patricia Vico, José Coronado. Cinematography: Josu Inchaustegui. Editing: Antonio Frutos. Running time: 99 minutes.
@pablsuarez
