3 out of 5

Directed By: Enrique Urbizu

There’s a line between respecting your audience’s ability to figure things out and just leaving things too open.  Sure, you can draw that line as a steep or shallow slope depending on your own perceived acuity, but the line certainly always exists.  I’d consider myself a pretty attentive film watcher, and I appreciate when the creatives behind a flick leave room for a viewer’s brain to function.  But when watching ‘No Rest for the Wicked,’ I kept wondering if I’d missed some subtitles at some point explaining the direction in which we seemed to be headed.  I believed I understood – and I was correct – but it’s bafflingly mediocre in how sparse its actual story ends up being compared to the heavy tone with which it’s executed.  Urbizu directs with a very confident eye, masterfully handling several complicated compositions with well-placed (and not distracting) reflections or focuses, but as the film ticks along with nothing much to add, the skill behind the lens seems wasted.  Similarly with our lead actor, José Coronado, playing our no-way-you-can-like-him bad cop who continues to be bad for the whole flick.  Most actors in the gruff cop role make the brittle edge too sharp – but guided by Coronado, ‘Santos’ is imposing without having to shout or raise a fist, but grizzled and fallible enough to make him believable.  Alas, this subtlety has only a few moments of use.  Otherwise its cut to Santos watching someone, cut to the someone watched, cut to Santos… for about an hour and a half.  And compositional skill aside, our cast of characters beyond our principles don’t have near enough presence to match a name with a face, making this stakeout scenes even more drawn out when you’re questioning who you’re supposed to be watching.

The main sin is committed right from the start, though.  Santos walks into a bar after closing, drunk, and ends up (ahem) over-reacting and killing three people.  A witness gets away.  Our cop cleans the scene, but has to find the witness to truly seal the deal.  He covers his investigation with a search for a missing girl – fortunate since he works in missing persons – and somewhat lucks out when the murders are believed to be drug and/or terrorist related.  But there might be something to that.  As the police continue to ‘close in’ on Santos during their investigation, Santos gets closer to his witness, as well as whatever odd dealings with which he may be involved.  I say ‘close in,’ but… hardly.  There’s no tension.  Mostly because you don’t give a shit.  That’s the sin.  We’re never given any reason why Santos reacted the way he did except that he’s a fuck up.  He doesn’t even give us the satisfaction of freaking out, or, if this was truly noir, further burying himself by trying to cover it up.  No, he mostly knows what he’s doing, and goes about it fairly calmly.  He’s just a bad dude, and one we don’t care about, and there’s no conspiracy or plot surprises to knock us off our feet. Combine that with the faceless side characters and perhaps you can tell why I was puzzled as to the focus of the film.

But it’s not a bad movie – the actors use the few lines there are effectively, Coronado, as mentioned, is under-utilized but easy to watch, and the movie gives the good impression that something will eventually happen… which it does, so you keep watching.  It just would’ve been nice if this had been whittled down to something a bit tighter or more thought-compelling.