Un crimen argentino

An Argentinian Crime, a wordplay with a perfect crime, tries to tell the story of a kidnapping during the last Argentinian Dictatorship.

During that time, in Argentina, the military government dissapeared and killed 30 thousands of political disidents, therefore, it was a tough time for lawyers and judges.

With that being said, this movie had a lot of potential and things to explore, but it falls short ov everything. The love interest of the protagonist is plain, we don´t know why they are together, and it doesn´t add anything to the plot. The political trama doesn´t match with the time, it could be happening any time, and it wouldn´t make a difference.

Photographically speaking, it´s a good film, but it imitates the Hollywood films set in that time. The dialogues are also kind of plain and imposed.

It´s a very forgettable film, and at the end you are just waiting for it to end.

The core of this movie is a fairly good police thriller that begins with a kidnapping in Rosario, Argentina. Because of the prominence of the kidnapping victim - and perhaps the communist insurgency Argentina experienced at the time - the plot has the police and the military looking for the culprits in parallel and at times intersecting and overlapping. The criminological plot is enjoyable, as is the inevitable but less important romance. The aspects of the plot involving the military authorities intruding on the police investigation, riding roughshod over it, and then the eventual denouement, however, feel incoherent and fairly contrived. Whatever one thinks of the Argentinian military dictatorship (I don't really care) the brutal behavior by members of the military doesn't necessarily have an apparent internal logic and partly really seems contrived. If you need to kill time and want to see a bit of Argentina, why not?

First of all, you need to have a solid background in the history of Argentina to understand the setting. The film expects you to know the basics of the time period and the political and military agendas in the country.

Second, the film seems to be lacking a coherent structure. The introductory scenes are not really introducing anything besides shorts of the characters we don't know, lots of names that are hard to connect and unclear motivations. Some characters look similar to each other, so you have to pay a lot of attention to be able to distinguish and them from one another and overall understand what is supposed to be going on.

Furthermore, many scenes are either unclear or misplaced, making the viewer constantly wonder why the things shown are important. They probably wanted to make a combination of a gritty detective buddy film and a pseudo-documentary, since lots of things are supposedly based on a real story. But the blend didn't go well for sure.

So when it turns out that the real story isn't that unique or interesting, the crime itself isn't that special or engaging, the poorly shot final reveal provokes no emotions and there's another reason for that. The reason (and the most glaring issue) is - the were no characterizations in the film. The characters don't reflect on what's going on, so there is no way you can get engaged in the story. They work and have minor interpersonal relations, that is pretty much all there is. I'd say that most of the scenes in the film felt like a videogame cutscene, but videogame cutscenes tend to have more interesting interactions than this film had.

Around 30 minutes of the film could've been cut, but was left in. Many scenes are way too detailed for no reason, and the pace never changed. They tried to include a sense of urgency, but there was never any tension. It just felt like someone with no prior experience wanted to make a film, but had missed all the important elements of a crime investigation thriller/pseudo-documentary.

Some of the acting and dialogue pieces were also very unconvincing, and extras in many scenes felt like they were edited in from a 80ties low-budget police detective series.

Overall, I'd say that this film was unnecessary long, not particularly interesting or engaging, lacking in characterizations and character development, structure, editing, acting and dialogue. It was forgettable, and I had gained no enjoyment from watching it.

I cannot recommend this film.

Watching this Argentine movie didn't give me an insight into the psyche of the country's people, their hopes and dreams, their prejudices, their fears, and their dark pasts. This doesn't mean every Argentine film should come with a history lesson, but after watching other films, like for example "Argentina, 1985", "Nine Queens" and "Secret in Their Eyes", I felt the story was lacking overall, the plot was slow-paced, not good enough and could have been pumped up with some action to improve the story and keep viewers engaged. It has a good combination of scene description, character development, and police investigation, but there is not a great deal of suspense nor action in this movie.