guido-fuortes

No surprise. The usual ingredients: a redeemed violent character, now working in a honest job, with a beloved young daughter in disputed custody with the mother, and a young girl, a family friend, rapted by Russian mafia represented by tatooed and completely dumb gangsters.

The commonplace of the ingredients is not what makes the movie poor. The same idea of a 'retired' killer who goes back to action can give birth to excellent films. An example for all, The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999).

But is the cocktail of the low quality ingredients that make this film poor. It's the simplicity, the rude and artless staging and acting, added to a script by Sylvester Stallone, that make the film poor. It's not even worth for a rainy Saturday afternoon.

A short film by a Spanish director from Extremadura, also responsible of the original script. The short pretends to mimic film noir aesthetics and mood, with an extremely simple structure: four actors in 2 locations. According to the official leaflet, the idea originated during a journey to Barcelona that the director made with his wife very long ago, with no clue of the relevance of this information, if any. Twenty-two years after, Juan Carlos Macias shot the movie (why such an enormous lapse of tiem? Again, no clue). We do not know how long the shooting took, nothing about tech specifications, means, budget, distribution and what one could expect visiting IMDB database.

'Ego' seems to pay more attention to the mood rather that to the coherence (a glitch in the short might mislead spectators' understanding), but the general intention is achieved with a more than acceptable photography, acting editing and soundtrack.

The best: it's really short. The worst: is dull.

I approached this short with some interest, but I found it very deceiving. The plot (this word in this case is an insult) is null, the photography, praised by some readers, is obvious, the acting does not exist. It's difficult to understand how people -referring to the troupe- can waste time and resources (even if, in this case, reduced), in order to produce such a banality. If you wish to watch the movie, the trailer is enough. It's not a spoiler, it is the essence of the whole short. The only positive point is that's not a great waste of time: its short duration (just above 10 minutes) does not steal much of one's time.