GRINGO (2018)

Genre: Comedy/Action
Director: Nash Edgerton
Cast: David Oyelowo, Charlize Theron, Joel Edgerton, Amanda Seyfried, Sharlto Copley, Thandie Newton
Runtime: 1 hr 50 mins
Rating: M18 (Sexual Scene and Coarse Language)
Released By: Golden Village Pictures
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 15 March 2018

Synopsis: An exhilarating mix of dark comedy, white-knuckle action and dramatic intrigue, Gringo joyrides into Mexico, where mild-mannered businessman Harold Soyinka (David Oyelowo) finds himself at the mercy of his back-stabbing business colleagues back home, local drug lords and a morally conflicted black-ops mercenary. Crossing the line from law-abiding citizen to wanted criminal, Harold battles to survive his increasingly dangerous situation in ways that raise the question: Is he out of his depth - or two steps ahead?

Movie Review:

The titular ‘foreigner’ is Harold Soyinka (David Oyelowo), a sweet-natured but down-on-his-luck middle-level executive at a pharmaceutical company who finds out that he is about to lose his job. His old college friend and boss Richard Rusk (Joel Edgerton) is on the cusp of selling the company, and the conniving CEO as well as his equally amoral co-president Elaine Markinson (Charlize Theron) have invited themselves along one of Harold’s casual trips to the company’s plant in Mexico because they need to offload some off-the-books deals with a drug cartel. To add insult to injury, Richard has been sleeping with Harold’s wife Bonnie (Thandie Newton), who breaks up with him via FaceTime while he is overseas. Disillusioned, disenchanted and disgruntled, Harold decides to stage his own hostage kidnapping in order to bilk his employers out of the $5 million employee travel insurance.

It’s no surprise that nothing goes according to plan, and among the other disparate pieces of the narrative puzzle are: a small-time hood Miles (Harry Treadway) dragging his clueless girlfriend Sunny (Amanda Seyfried) on a drug run, a Mexican drug lord (Carlos Corona) with an obsession over late-era Beatles albums, a former CIA assassin Mitch (Sharlto Copley) who’s now running a non-profit in Haiti, and last but not least Harold’s shady Mexican counterpart (Yul Vazquez) at the plant whose motivations for tracking down Harold remain unclear. As scripted by Anthony Tambakis and Matthew Stone, Harold is the only decent fellow amidst an ensemble of grifters, scammers and liars – and not surprisingly, Harold goes from innocence to wisdom over the course of the movie, discovering his own wit and mettle along the way to outsmart his enemies at their own game.

Per convention too, there are betrayals, mistaken identities and switchbacks to try to keep one guessing. Such crime romps were aplenty in the 90s, ranging from Coen brothers’ classics like ‘Fargo’ to pulpy Elmore Leonard adaptations like ‘Out of Sight’ and ‘Get Shorty’. ‘Gringo’ falls somewhere in between: it isn’t at all as clever as the best of the Coens, but it does offer some genuine laughs every now and then. In fact,  having more than one too many colourful character ultimately dulls the fun, by setting up too many moving pieces that the script cannot quite juggle all at the same time – subplots like Sunny’s parallel journey in Mexico with her deceiving boyfriend Miles or Mitch’s shifting loyalties as he forms an unexpected bond with Harold feel entirely superfluous, leaving too little time for character work on any of the key characters for them to be more than cut from cupboard.  

It doesn’t help that director Nash Edgerton (older brother of Joel, in case you’re wondering), who is making his sophomore feature-length film after 2008’s critically praised ‘The Square’, fails to inject much spark or fizz into the unnecessarily convoluted proceedings. Quite the contrary, Edgerton’s direction feels oddly enervating, switching between and among characters without any firm sense of continuity. To his credit, he carefully sets up the narrative dominoes at the start – beginning with Harold’s fake distress call to Richard and Elaine and then circling back to fill in what happened two days prior – but seems helpless to control where or how they fall thereafter. Even when you know everything is coming to a head, Edgerton fails to build enough momentum for the mayhem to reach a sufficiently absurd level of madness, and the fact that the script relies too much on coincidences and just-in-times at its climax fails to help.

But if anything, ‘Gringo’ has assembled an overqualified list of performers who are delightful to watch even as caricatures. (Joel) Edgerton swaggers and blusters, Theron is on full-on sex appeal mode while glorying in her meanness, Copley is an engaging wild card, and Seyfried is appealing as ever as an ingenue. But perhaps the biggest revelation here is Oyelowo, thus far seen in dramatic roles like Martin Luther King in ‘Selma’, who proves surprisingly funny in deadpan when harried and distressed. Like we said before, Harold is the only truly nice guy here, and Oyelowo brings both grace and humanity to his character. Thanks to him and his peers, ‘Gringo’ is a lot more entertaining than the sum of its individual parts. As long as you’re not expecting it to make sense, there is enough pulp to make this crime lark a diverting, if unwholesome, pleasure.

Movie Rating:

(Ironic as it may seem, the cast of 'gringos' overcome an under-developed yet over-convoluted script as well as lethargic direction to make this pulpy crime lark a diverting, if unwholesome, pleasure)

Review by Gabriel Chong