Rent Gringo (2018)

Gringo (aka Untitled Nash Edgerton Project) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

I was constantly thinking during Gringo about some writing advice I’d heard from authors and screenplay writers, that a script doesn’t have to feature likable characters. But there’s not much in Gringo to like. All of its characters are desperate and despicable, where you can’t trust anyone and only the strong and corrupt survive. The film is staged as a comedy but rather than find funny in the speed of corporate greed and criminals would instead have us laugh at its slickness and analogies of carrots and gorillas.

The sadsack centerpiece of this farce is Harold Soyinka (David Oyelowo), a man long overdue for some good karma. He’s deep in debt, his bosses at a drug company won’t help him out, and he’s due to be fired with an upcoming merger. It gets worse. His wife is cheating on him (with his boss no less) and there’s talk with the boss’ shrill witch of a co-president of the company about offing Harold in their shady deals. What is such a pitiful man to do? If you can’t beat ‘em, join em. And in this scenario, that means staging phony kidnappings with a hefty ransom, doomed to lead to down a plot messy with blood, bullets, and misunderstandings.

It’s a tall order for a film this dense with characters and blunt with nastiness to be seen as a comedy. To its benefit, the actors are all struggling as hard as they can to act their butts off inside their cartoonish roles. Joel Edgerton plays Harold’s boss, Richard Rusk, with a level of uneasy cynicism you can sense boiling beneath that assuring smile that everything will be okay. Charlize Theron does exceptionally well as Richard’s troublesome co-president/sexual partner Elaine, delighting in everything from vicious bedroom affairs to cutthroat corporate warfare, where she may or may not get a high from literal throat-cutting. Sharlto Copley fits his usual profile of being an untrustworthy mercenary that becomes an unpredictable force of seeking the best means of extortion. And that may not even be half the characters in this messy story that keeps a slew of players swirling and smashing into each other around Mexico, to the point where its no longer funny coincidences but plot requirements.

The film struggles so hard to find humor in its characters that they all have to come branded with a weak gag to babble. Take, for example, the cartel boss played by Carlos Corona, whose one and only quirk is that he’s a die-hard fan of The Beatles, in dialogue only. How hilarious it must have been to write him as a villain that only kills based on album preferences. Harold’s cheating wife (Thandie Newton) tries to explain why she lost interest with a story about an experiment involving bouncing balls and a random gorilla. Richard employs a similar explanation about keeping Harold in line with a story about learning to eat carrots and wait for your bananas, referencing another experiment. It would kill these people to talk like human beings, especially when Harold’s Mexican adventure has everyone scrambling for money and dominance when all personality evaporates.

While Gringo is certainly slick in its fast-paced cartel comedy of shootouts, backstabbings, and car chases, it neglects to give us sufficient reason to care about anyone. Every player is presented as a means of forced humor and twisting the plot without a single person to be invested in. It could have been Harold with his religious beliefs and desire to do good, but even he comes over to the dark side when he realizes its the only way to win. I can only assume it was meant to be a happy ending with the last shot of Oyelowo looking into the camera and shooting a rarely seen smile. All that final scene did, accompanied by a few bad people that get away, left a bitter note go out on, as though someone slapped a laugh track on Sicario. Isn’t it hilarious that a man has nothing to go back to in Chicago and must remain underground in Mexico because corporate and cartel stooges put him in this situation? What a hoot, that Gringo.