Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme six, part three- a South American film!
(Chosen by John!)
Low-budget Chilean fimmaker Ernesto Díaz Espinoza has the start of a good idea in Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman: take a standard crime-action plot about a gutless loser caught in a mob hit, and reflect his video game obsession by styling portions of the film after the Grand Theft Auto series. As such, the tale of Santiago hunting down the Machine Gun Woman in twenty-four hours lest he find himself at the business end of a gangster's gun is punctuated with little flourishes either lifted directly from or inspired by Rockstar's popular franchise. Characters' names and bounties are flashed onscreen as means of introduction, Santiago racks up higher bounties with the crimes he commits, and segments are divided by shots of a car driving with the exact angle and framing you'd see in San Andreas, complete with GTA-font announcing upcoming missions and their success or failure. At first, it's enough to patch over the film's lack of money for proper sets or lighting by making it all feel like a big ol' piss-take on this type of exploitation send-up. Sort've a, "Haha, this dweeb's in way over his head and trying to feel like a badass by viewing things through a gaming lens, ain't it funny?" and it IS plenty amusing for a while. Genuinely seems like we're actively aware of how Santiago is this pathetic dork trying to play it smooth with hot informants way out of his league and buying an Airsoft pistol to bluff his way through a hit, and it works to great effect, for a time.
Once he crosses paths with the Machine Gun Woman, though? The movie starts to wobble and come undone at the seams. It's able to ride the goodwill of its first act for a fair way's, but one quickly realizes it's not going to do anything more with the GTA-theming beyond allow Santiago to fail missions every now and again. What worked as a clever twist on a standard grindhouse send-up reveals itself as a thin coat of paint to disguise the transition into "Nobody schlub falls for ultra-hot assassin chick who could kill him in seconds but she's actually into it." There are... attempts to make the relationship between the two work - Fernanda Urrejola definitely plays things like she's just toying with him to see if he's got anything substantial to match the gall necessary to pull a toy gun on Chile's best assassin, and they don't get together in the end, which is nice. The film still drifts away from playing with video game conventions in favor of stuff like a badly shot post-bullet removal sex scene in a car and asking Urrejola to play a betrayal scene with some really unearned slow-mo puppy dog eyes. It feels trapped between goofing on Santiago and its own premise for a quick lark, and fully embracing the power fantasy to jerk off on your face.
Push the video game weirdness further, and I'm far readier to go along with Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman. The film already cold opens on the Machine Gun Woman taking out some colorful assassins in a convenience store, including a one-man band whose drums come outfitted with guns. It already has heightened moments like a man blowing his scalp sky high with a shotgun to the chin after he's shot in the leg, or a crusty old fucker with some mad HTML skills for his character-select page on HireAnAssassin Dot Org. We've room aplenty to push the bounty thing further by having Santiago rack up incremental pesos for petty crimes along the way, or even lose wanted money for particularly wimpy actions. Show things from the Machine Gun Woman's side, give us some insight on what a video game world's like for someone who's essentially an untouchable top-ranked player. Get in more carjacking to build up to Santiago finally stealing a high-class sports car at the end and instantly losing it, maybe playing on the constant shittiness of the vehicles he nabs. Hell, if you really wanna make the sex scene work, just cram a Hot Coffee joke in there somehow. Once you start looking for ways to get these bits and bobs into the film, it becomes ridiculously easy to get even more ridiculous without spending THAT much more money.
I'm aware my saying "the best way to improve this movie is to double down on the gimmick!" doesn't make the film sound like it has much potential on its own merits, and... yeah, Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman is trash no matter what you do with it. Important thing is, the GTA stuff has the potential to make it unique trash, fun trash, the kind of trash you don't mind getting in your mouth while you're wallowing neck-deep. It's definitely got that appeal going for the first twenty-five minutes or so, before slowly bleeding as it becomes more about the standard, boring trash of 0/10 dork falls for 10/10 killer without as much gaminess to stem the flow. I'll champion appealing, enjoyable trash, and if you can make less engaging garbage into more exciting rubbish by mucking around with game concepts, then yeah, I'm down. Making it a bit clearer that we're kicking a power fantasy in the face rather than full-on indulging one would be nice too, but I believe going "Yeah, it's Vice City or whatever but it's a Chilean movie," would help achieve the same effect along the way. Just gimme my full-impact stupid viddy bootleg movie already.
(It's almost impressive how they captured the look of driving in GTA so perfectly, and then use an awful-looking first-person view where someone's hand takes up 90% of the screen for the gunplay. The Goldeneye 007 rip-off movie is shooting two streets down, guys.)
2.5/5
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