Review of Gringo (2018) by Thequietgamer — 31 Aug 2018

It's all just watching a decent guy get screwed over by awful people for almost two hours. You know, for a supposed dark comedy it's not really funny. As a crime-thriller it also falls short as nothing actually happens for the first hour or so. It isn't until Sharlto Copley shows up that Gringo decides to finally start moving all of those pieces it spent so long setting up. Even when the bullets begin to fly though, the movie never manages to make anything compelling come from it's uninspired writing.

All of the film's plot twists (and there are a lot of them) are rather predictable and therefore never serve the intended purpose of deviating from the expected outcome(s). The entire subplot involving Harry Treadaway and Amanda Seyfried serves no purpose at all. It's inclusion is just baffling. And for a tale so centered on everybody wanting a piece of a pharmaceutical company's potentially profitable product, there's remarkably little time spent on telling the viewers anything about the pill in question. Money appears and disappears out of nowhere, the stories of side-characters like Thandie Newton and Hernán Mendoza are left dangling for the majority of the running time, and the whole thing is overcrowded to the point where so much of what's going on feels like a collection of half-baked ideas that never quite coalesce into something cohesive.

With so much of the larger plot surrounding the protagonist "Harold" failing to come together, the only thing to latch onto is caring about said main character. Unfortunately, Gringo's attention is pulled in so many different directions that it's star ends up feeling lost in the shuffle so much of the time. As good of a performance as David Oyelowo gives, bless his heart, he never really struck me as having leading man potential even with his character having been intentionally written in a way that makes him as likable and sympathetic as possible.

What really stinks about Gringo though? It isn't funny. Some laughs would have gone a long way. I might have even been more forgiving on it as a whole. But no, we just watch Harold get tormented and betrayed by just about everyone he comes in contact with to the point where the movie feels mean-spirited right up to it's "haha, the bad guys got what they deserved in the end!" conclusion that feels undeserved and unsatisfying. Squandering both it's great cast and creatively vulgar dialog in the process.