POINTS: 5
Manuel Rico (Víctor Mallarino) is a middle-aged widower and a rich businessman who lives with his three grown-up children, Javi (Juan Fernando Sánchez), Bárbara (Julieth Restrepo), and Charly (José Restrepo) in a posh manor in Bogotá. On the one hand, Manuel has given his children everything they always wanted to the point of spoiling them rotten. On the other hand, he’s also been an absent father who has never connected very well with his children. He’s the typical businessman who’s always busy.
Pretty much out of the blue, he has a stroke and ends up in the hospital. This is when the status quo begins to change as he realizes how bad it is that his children have taken for granted the lifestyle he has provided. What’s even worse, though, is that his own company faces embezzlement charges, so almost all his properties and belongings are confiscated. Needless to say, no one has the money to settle these matters legally. So the family hides out in a secluded two-bit house. Reduced to an almost penniless state, the grown-up children will have to do something they’d never done before: work.
Malcriados (“Spoiled”), directed by Colombian writer and filmmaker Felipe Martínez Amador and written by Mariano Vega, is a cliché of a movie from the first frame to the last. Stereotyped characters utter an equally stereotyped dialogue, the performers overact, you see the uninspired gags coming from a mile away, the incidental music is unbearable, and the mise-en-scene makes you recall a mediocre TV movie.
The chief idea of the film seems to be that once a family is confronted with a huge crisis, it should stand united; its members must trust each other and talk about their hidden emotions and longings, and in the end they will surely become a better family, one that is nurturing and supportive. Because in Malcriados a financial crisis like any other is more than enough for a complete change of lifestyle, without that much effort and in a relatively short period of time: a life lesson for a wholesome family — never mind how farfetched it is.
The reasons why Malcriados looks and sounds like a mediocre TV flick are pretty diverse. It’s not only because its narrative consists of a series of autonomous scenes with little dramatic progression, but mostly because, in terms of style, absolutely nothing stands out. The camerawork, for instance, is static and flat; or take the overall photography, which lacks creativity and instead relies on dull formulas. What’s more disappointing is that the characters never come across as individuals, but rather as shallow vessels performing actions meant to be comic.
The idea of rich and spoiled children who face the real world as adults is already rather over-explored, but if executed with a minimum degree of originality and a somewhat personal approach to comedy, then it could be the right stuff for a decent movie. But when everything is so obvious, so heavy-handed, then what you get is just a lame feature.
Production notes
Malcriados (Argentina, Colombia, 2016). Directed by Felipe Martínez Amador. Written by Mariano Vera. With Víctor Mallarino, Julieth Restrepo, Juan Fernando Sánchez, José Restrepo, Michel Brown, Yuli Pedraza. Cinematography: Juan Carlos Gil. Editing: Alejandro Parysow. Running time: 111 minutes.
@pablsuarez
