Los Ultimos Dias de la Víctima (The Last Days of the Victim) narrates the downfall of professional assassin Raúl Mendizábal due to a sequence of bad decisions. These decisions are caused by a combination of hubris, accumulated stress, loss of motivation and a misplaced yearning for the "normal" life.
Federico Luppi plays Mendizábal to perfection, supported by the always excellent Ulises Dumont and Julio de Grazia. The female characters don't have many lines except for Mónica Galán and China Zorrila, the later typecast in her usual wisecracking-slightly-obnoxious character that she has played in many movies.
Script by director Adolfo Aristarain and José Pablo Feinmann, based in a novel by Feinmann. There have been many movies about hit men, especially American, and this one is perhaps not overly original, but it does not try to glamorize the business. Aristarain's direction is well paced and dynamic. The music is somewhat obtrusive at times.
Aristarain had achieved international recognition with its previous film, Tiempo de Revancha (Time for Revenge) in 1981. This film put Argentine movies in the world map, after hard times for the industry that started in the early seventies and became even harder with the military takeover in 1976. Aristarain went on to direct three top movies of the new Argentine cinema, "A Place in the World" (1992), "Common Ground" (2002) and "Roma" (2004), where he deals with problems such as living and working in exile (drawn from his own experience) and the allure and pitfalls of returning to one's place in the world.
As many of the significant Argentine films of the last half century, The Last Days of the Victim was produced by Héctor Olivera; the production company was Aries Cinematográfica, founded by Olivera and director Fernando Ayala in 1956.
