'Gringo' - Review

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Laughs are sparse and the plot’s a farce in this occasionally funny but largely overstuffed caper from Nash Edgerton. David Oyelowo stars as Harold Soyinka, a hapless corporate underdog whose attempt to get back at his obnoxious boss, Richard (Joel Edgerton), by faking his own kidnapping by the Mexican cartel goes wrong.

A simple and perfectly workable setup (disgruntled employee hatches ridiculous plan) soon becomes an odyssey involving not only the cartels but a botched drug deal, a young couple caught in the middle (Harry Treadaway and Amanda Seyfried), a corrupt boss, adultery back home, and corporate espionage. For a labyrinthine spy thriller: great. In terms of keeping a self-billed comedy afloat: very unhelpful.

Almost as unhelpful is the film’s depiction and utilisation of Mexico and it’s culture. It’s all Day of the Dead celebrations, shady bars, drug running and the aforementioned cartels, or simply a foundation for useful - and highly misleading - marketing materials (the poster is plastered with various flowered skulls and similar paraphernalia). The image painted by said posters and the snappy trailer sets the audience up for a laugh-a-minute romp, but in fact the laughter comes dotted across vast deserts of joyless meandering. The one good piece of slapstick (Sharlto Copley’s bearded spy being knocked into a roly-poly by a car) is in the trailer, and the remaining violence is too efficiently brutal, too truly nasty to be in any way amusing. 

And, stuck helplessly in the middle of everything, is Oyelowo. That he’s been given the lead role in a mainstream American comedy should be cause for celebration (even more so when he gets to use his native Nigerian accent), but it’s a piece of casting that puts his powers to little use. His unshakable aura of intelligence betrays any attempt to portray Harold sincerely, but his natural charisma stays the course during all-too-brief scenes of character-building between the clueless stooge and Seyfried’s beaming holidaymaker.

The film is completely stolen from under all of them by Charlize Theron as Edgerton’s number two, a shy and sultry businesswoman with a penchant for loose shirts and cutting insults. Think Cruella de
Vil with a pixie cut. Her quest to toss aside the many useless men makes for some entertaining payoff once the countless convoluted threads come together, but it’s too little too late.