Matando Cabos (2004, Alejandro Lozano)

"A dark, offbeat comedy about a group of Mexico City teens embroiled in a kidnapping involving a retired wrestling legend and a parrot."

Matando Cabos (Killing Cabos) was one of the most popular Mexican film in 2004/2005. It even won a couple of awards and took home the MTV en Espanol award for "Favorite Movie" among other things. I was curios to watch it to just see what a big mainstream film is like in Mexico and how it compares to an American film. I am happy and both sad that there is a big difference between the two but I am sad to say that it's not that big of a difference really.

The movie is about two young guys who by mistake kidnap one of the guys father in law. They set off to simply take him home and dump him on his front lawn but when an ex Mexican wrestler,a fighting midget, 2 would be kidnappers, and a crazy next door neighbor become involed over the night everything becomes crazy and close to impossible to pull off.

With a plot like that you can expect the film to be a lot of fun, which it is, but it also should ring a bell in your head. If it does, it's because you have already seen this film over,and over, and over again. It falls into the "Tarantino Wannabe" pile along with Lock Stock,Snatch, Boondock Saints, Go, and plenty of others. It's one of those films where every other character has something eccentric about them and every other scene uses some cinematic device like a flashback scene, or a "5 minutes earlier" scene to establish each of these "crazy" characters pasts. When the film started to do this I even thought "awwww shit not another one" but to my surprise it was actually good.

The thing that Matando Cabos has that most of these other wannabe films do not have is a small dose of creativity. It was nice to see the Tarantino formula put into a non gangster film. The plot of this film at least uses the multi story plot device to make things move along in a very fun way that keeps everything to a point where you don't know whats going to happen next.

Matando Cabos is an odd film to critique. It's nothing new because it uses plot devices which have become cliched ,so it's nothing new. Yet it is something new because it uses them to move along a fresh approach to these kinds of films. I don't know if I should applaud this or not but I do know that i had a lot of fun watching it.

- ***