Gringo
Cert: 15 1hr 50mins
What are the chances, huh? Less than a month after Black Panther roared into our cinemas, along comes another film with one key character called, er, Black Panther, and another employing an African accent that could easily come straight from the Panther’s home state of Wakanda. It’s an amazing coincidence but, thankfully for all concerned, there is no way Gringo could ever be mistaken for Marvel’s black superhero picture.
It’s a comedy for starters, albeit of the dark and occasionally quite violent variety, with a starry cast led by a trio of actors hitherto hardly known for making us laugh: Charlize Theron, Joel Edgerton and David Oyelowo.
To be fair, Theron has shown a growing willingness to send herself modestly up in the likes of Fast & Furious 8, Atomic Blonde and Mad Max: Fury Road. Here, however, she’s going all-out for grown-up laughs and is so confident of succeeding that she co-produces too. Or to put it another way, she has ‘skin in the game’, which, when you see how many buttons she leaves undone to play corporate femme fatale and arch deal-maker Elaine Markinson, seems an all too appropriate epigram.
David Oyelowo as kidnap victim Harold. The whole thing is brought more or less together by director Nash Edgerton, brother of Joel and a film-maker better known for his music videos
Harold (Oyelowo) has been kidnapped in Mexico and his kidnappers want $5 million to hand him back
Elaine’s way of succeeding in the alpha-male world in which she works may be politically incorrect (lose the bra, flirt shamelessly and, if all else fails, try dirty talk), but it is effective. And funny too. Theron is probably the best thing in a film that delivers some nice lines and certainly entertains but ultimately is just a little too familiar and complicated for its own good.
That sense of familiarity arrives early, after an opening that sees a PA nervously interrupting her boss with an important-sounding phone call. Judging by the way Richard Rusk (Edgerton) is adjusting his trousers, and how his glamorous colleague Markinson is loitering in his private bathroom, the call is clearly ill-timed. But Rusk’s much put-upon PA (‘hungry’, ‘thirsty’ he charmlessly barks at her) is right: it is an important call. Their colleague Harold (Oyelowo) has been kidnapped in Mexico and his kidnappers want $5 million to hand him back.
Cue the almost inevitable ‘two days earlier’ caption and we start the long, familiar process known as ‘getting back to the beginning’, a narrative structure that wasn’t new even when Steven Soderbergh employed it to terrific effect in Out Of Sight, way back in 1998.
Charlize Theron as corporate femme fatale Elaine Markinson. Elaine’s way of succeeding in the alpha-male world in which she works may be politically incorrect but it is effective
We definitely know how this goes and Gringo pulls no surprises. The Nigerian-born and somewhat unworldly Harold, we quickly gain the impression, is a stooge, a potentially sacrificial pawn in whatever scam Rusk and the icy-hearted Markinson have got going way down Mexico way. Given that they run a pharmaceuticals company and that the tangled trail quickly leads to a Beatles-loving cartel boss known as the Black Panther (you tell him Sgt Pepper is their best album at your peril), we have a good idea of what sort of illegality we are dealing with.
Ah, but is Harold – a man with money troubles and a high-maintenance wife who might just be cheating on him (Thandie Newton) – quite as innocent as he appears? You have no idea how complicated it will be finding out or, indeed, how many minor characters will be needlessly involved.
Amanda Seyfried and Harry Treadaway are the obvious casualties of at least one subplot too many, although the South African Sharlto Copley runs them close as Rusk’s preposterous mercenary brother, Mitch.
The whole thing is brought more or less together by director Nash Edgerton, brother of Joel and a film-maker better known for his music videos than for his main features.
Right: Sharlto Copley as mercenary Mitch. Left: Thandie Newton plays the wife of the kidnapped Harold
But he doesn’t do a bad job here, delivering enough naughty laughs to do Theron’s career no harm, encouraging his brother to productively play the unlikeable straight man, and ensuring that Oyelowo and Newton appear in what is still that cinematic rarity, a ‘colour-blind’ film where black characters are there in their own narrative right rather than for comedy purposes or to play ‘best friends’ as a token sop to ethnic diversity.
Nevertheless, we have been this cartel-related dark-comedy way many times before, with the likes of 2 Guns and How I Spent My Summer Vacation. That said, I don’t think the inevitably violent dénouement has ever played out in front of a wittily placed ‘Disfruta Mexico’ (Enjoy Mexico) advertising hoarding. Gringo definitely has its moments.
SECOND SCREEN
Wonder Wheel (12A)
Rating: 
You Were Never Really Here (15)
Rating: 
Walk Like A Panther (12A)
Rating: 
Sweet Country (15)
Rating:
Kate Winslet recently said she had ‘bitter regrets’ about working with certain male directors. Was she talking about Woody Allen? If she was, that’s sad, not least because she is the best thing in Wonder Wheel (12A), the latest film from the 82-year-old scandal-beset director.
It’s set in Fifties Coney Island and has a wordy, melodramatic style that smacks more of play than film. Winslet plays Ginny, a frustrated wife whose life starts to look up when she begins an affair with a younger man (Justin Timberlake). And then her pretty stepdaughter, played by the always watchable Juno Temple, turns up…
There’s the kernel of a good idea in Walk Like A Panther, a British film hoping to whip up nostalgia for ITV’s wrestling of the Seventies and Eighties. Unfortunately, the execution is poor
Kate Winslet recently said she had ‘bitter regrets’ about working with certain male directors
Lynne Ramsay hasn’t made a film for more than six years but she’s back on stylish, stylised form with You Were Never Really Here (15), an art-house thriller. Slow and idiosyncratic, it’s difficult to know which is working harder – the driving score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood or Joaquin Phoenix as a traumatised, hammer-wielding hitman hired to find a senator’s daughter.
There’s the kernel of a good idea in Walk Like A Panther (12A), a British film hoping to whip up nostalgia for ITV’s wrestling of the Seventies and Eighties. Unfortunately, the execution is so poor and the comedy so weak, it won’t succeed.
Sweet Country (15) has Hamilton Morris as Sam, an aboriginal farmhand forced to go on the run when he shoots a drunken, gun-toting rancher who, unknown to him, has just raped his wife. Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown) rounds up a posse and gives chase, but what chance does Sam have against ‘white fellah’ justice? Set just after World War I, this Aussie western slightly outstays its welcome.
Matthew Bond