Torrente 5: Operación Eurovegas

Casposo (dandruffy) is used in Spain to describe poor concoctions, endeavors that lack ambition, half hearted efforts that exploit the simplest forms of entertainment. Torrente, Santiago Seguraś character returns for a 5th outing and the results are what you can expect when a franchise has been eploited for so long, specially if its core elements are bad taste humor, fecal jokes, and continuous demonstrations of bad manners. As usual, Torrente, mean spirited, shitty, bad mouthed, etc. has a grandiose plan for which he is forced to recruit the dumbest, most ridiculous and unoperative collection of crooks, embodied by an eccentric selection of real life has beens, freaky stand up comedians with no acting experience, a matador and some TV stars, with the added presence of A. Baldwin that seems to have had a good time entertaining those types, so far away from his world. The result is the one you would expect: hilarious for the addicts, so so for discriminating audiences.

Santiago Segura proves again he is a pretty good director, although devoured by his creation. Ford Coppola famously said once that Star Wars had ended the career of the most talented director of its generation. Something similar can be said about Segura: He seems to be a slave of his character, obsessed with serving yet another dose of its antics, each time with less success, but even so a success so big, in Spanish terms, at least, that keeps him entangled with his creation, unable to break away to other stories I'm sure he'll do as well or even better.