A guy walking his dog near a lake discovers a rotting impaled corpse. The police chief gives the exclusive to a depressed reporter in exchange for a favor. The reporter named Victor is estranged from his wife/girlfriend and keeps a mannequin in his room to talk to. He also suffers from hemorrhoids, an issue that gets a lot of attention at first for some reason and then is thankfully ignored for the rest of the movie.
While family members missing someone visit the morgue to see if they can identify the body, one of them becomes more involved in the investigation. He becomes Victor's humorous side-kick. He's also of humble means but interested in world affairs and asks political questions of Victor in order to learn.
In the meantime we get to know a politician involved in land deals, his lawyer, a strip club owner, an engineer working on planning a community on a piece of land. The investigation leads our team to a strip joint/whorehouse were a beautiful prostitute named Quica shows interest in Victor. He returns the next day and becomes involved with Quica.
It turns out that the dead person owned a huge piece of land over which various factions are fighting over. There's political intrigue, corruption, mobsters, thugs. And these various groups are looking for the original ownership documents which are necessary for any transfer of the property. There's also a twist as to the identity of the corpse.
So for the most part, the story is laid out clearly. There's some bureaucratic convolution but it seems fairly clear what happened and why. But the movie still manages to keep us interested in seeing what will happen to all the characters. What will happen with the relationship of Victor and Quica? Will the guilty parties be brought to justice? We have to recall here that the police chief a friend of Victor's and that corruption is rampant everywhere.
This Colombian/Spanish co-production is well-made and well-acted. I do think though that Victor is miscast. The role of Quica is performed by the gorgeous Martina García, who's both cute and sexy. She ends up stealing the show pretty much. Overall, the movie lacks some of the humor that we often find in Colombian movies. But it has some deep and touching moments, as when a gravedigger with leprosy asks our team to remember his name because no one wants to know his name. The music I found somewhat annoying- there some of those annoying silly tunes one finds in Italian movies. I did find the story interesting and cared for the characters.
The DVD comes with an excellent 90+ minutes behind the scenes feature where we get to see all sorts of things that can go wrong during film-making.
