Paraguayan crime caper 7 Boxes is a mix between gritty
realist thriller and black crime caper that sometimes work together and
sometimes is discordant and uncertain. I still can’t tell if I would have preferred it
to stick to one or the other (and which of those would have been better!) It
sometimes felt like the characters and their stories had come from two
different films and had accidentally got mixed up together.
It grabs your attention from the opening super-fast montage
scene and holds onto it throughout, it is certainly never predictable. Market
porter Victor is promised the money he needs to get the camera phone he craves
if he can just cart 7 boxes around away from their current location and back to
their owner, evading the police and gradually others. It is full of blackly comic mix ups,
incompetent villains and bungling police but also of deadly serious gang
members (one of whose motivation is to get money for his kid’s medication –
which doesn't really fit with comedy) and violent realism.
The camera work and editing is stunning – fast paced,
kinetic and evocative. It turns the
market setting into a character of its own. The ever twisting plot is competently handled
and mixes multiple elements well without feeling contrived or unconvincingly
coincidental.
On the whole, the
characters worked, and the actors were excellent, except that distractingly one
of the villains resembles Tom Cruise’s character from Tropic Thunder (complete
with dodgy bald wig and in this case false teeth) which I kept expecting to be
ripped from the character as some comedy plot point but isn't.
It is definitely a film worth seeing, mainly because it is
so gripping, energetic and full-on, but I wish it had settled on a tone and
stuck to it – probably the blacker comedy one – instead of presenting a
slightly strange and uncomfortable mixture, which means the film doesn't quite
fulfill its potential.
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