INTACTO (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2002)

Reviewed: January 7th, 2002

Had to read a few reviews just to figure out what exactly the fuck is going on here; turns out I was trying too hard to understand the finer points, since multiple critics can't seem to come to an agreement on the many, ultimately irrelevant ins and outs of Intacto's admittedly inspired premise. In a nutshell: Everyone has a certain luck quotient, average humans like me and presumably you have a, well, average amount, while holocaust and airplane crash survivors have more than nearly anyone else in the whole universe (although Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle brings up the excellent point of isn't anyone who avoided the holocaust or an airplane crash altogether even luckier than the survivors, but Intacto has no room for any sort of sensible logic or deeper querying) and through inconsistent means I don't fully understand (but one of them involves touching someone in slow motion, or kissing them, or, I think, hugging them) luck can be transferred from one human being to another. Average people can consent (or not, I guess it doesn't really matter) to giving (well, it frequently has to be won) their luck to luckier people, thereby rendering them the unluckiest sons of bitches in the world. Even the luck titans can end up transferring their luck to even luckier titans (I think), and the true Luck Gods, like Max von Sydow's character, can strip extra lucky people of their power just because they feel like it. Furthermore, the ending seems predicated on whether people can return others' stripped luck back to them, an issue which is never even touched upon. Exhausted yet? Long review short: Rarely have I spent so much time with three characters and cared so little about them. Rarely have I been strung along for so much time (you don't even have the slightest idea what the hell is happening until at least the thirty minute mark, and really don't know what's what until the end credits roll... oh wait, no, even then you still don't), and been delivered so little. This isn't a case of me faulting a film for shooting for the sky and coming up short; this is a case of a film thinking it can coast for nearly two hours on a cool, if convoluted, gimmick that never amounts to anything. There is no emotional investment to be found anywhere and ample opportunity to explore the relationship between Eusebio Poncela's and Leonardo Sbaraglia's characters, a relationship which should have driven the damn film, is completely squandered (as are the chances to advance the should-be important relationship between Poncela and von Sydow). "Good thriller screaming for an American remake!" yells an imdb user commenter, and his later idea's accurate. There's lots of potential here, but it needs shaping in the context of Real Human Beings.

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