This makes sense as the film is a passion project for Garcia, a martial artist and professed 80's action film fan; He's been trying to make a movie in his homeland of the genre he loves for the best part of the last two decades.
Set in a Spanish, but multicultural underworld of (mostly) honorable crime families, Lucero plays his part as the agent of chaos / murderous nutjob, complete with Yakuza training. After the raid on the Colombian drug lab, he stages a coup and proceeds to kill the head of his family (and his actual father) in an attempt to disrupt the balance of power between the city's crime families in a poorly-defined long term plan to take over all of them.
His blood brother Max is part of the old guard and must go, despite the fact that he was about to begin life as a civilian with his son. And so is a third sibling Maria (Andrea Duro). The aftermath leaves Max presumed dead, his son dead, and Maria missing in action.
Cut to two years later. Max and Maria are underground, plotting to bring down Lucero when he resurfaces to take control of the families in some sort of underworld council meeting. But then Max takes a troubled teen (Óscar Casas) under his wing... with disastrous results for both the teen and their (carefully?) planned vengeance.
The script is a mixed bag. On one hand it's great at setting up constant and varied setpieces, and full of great lines for both heroes and villains, with the villains getting some ridiculously good flair and loopy bits of dialogue (at least in its original Spanish version.) On the other hand... well, the plot isn't all that great. The teen character is a good example; while he's an integral part of the movie, he doesn't add a whole lot and it's hard to shake the feeling the film would do better without him.
People's actions don't always make sense, which is normal in this sort of thing -those action scenes won't line themselves up, you know- but there's a little too much plot here, which is a problem when that's definitely not one of its strengths.
More serious is a lack of payoff to things that seemed to be carefully set up - a particularly vicious villain is dispatched in a pretty unsatisfying way, for example, and Maria, who's established as a badass in her own right (and has a great fighting presence) is criminally underutilized.
It's ridiculously slick, though. Director Daniel Benmayor uses that Netflix money to stage a lot of very attractive aerial shots of Barcelona and gives the film an attractive, glossy sheen. The action is a bit more variable... literally, as it seems to switch filming and editing styles depending on each scene' s inspirations; The initial drug lab fight is very accomplished and clear, a later bathroom brawl is much more chaotically edited (though legible), but then there's a fight on a darkened garage that seems a lot less polished (Garcia seems to punch someone so hard he completely disappears for a split second, a weird but very funny editing glitch.)
It also doesn't really reach the heights of either its inspirations or the lesser, Netflix-produced 87 North films. Garcia is obviously an accomplished martial artist and shows off plenty of cool moves, and he certainly looks like he could take a mortar shell to the face and keep moving forward; The movie capitalizes on that by mostly using him as a tank who just takes the damage and occasionally repays it with interest. But as a result the fights don't really flow very well, which is a problem because as mentioned before, the action locations are varied but kind of derivative: A bathroom brawl! A discotheque shootout! An abandoned garage fight!
You're left with solid scenes that are missing something to latch on to, and seem to drag on after a while. Huge gushes of blood can only take you that far.
You're left with solid scenes that are missing something to latch on to, and seem to drag on after a while. Huge gushes of blood can only take you that far.
Still, it might not be great but it's certainly good enough - and full of wince-inducing bloody carnage (stand by for a great, extremely bloody throat stab).
Garcia is not a great actor and his character Max is a bit clichéd, but he's got a nice intensity, and when it breaks down he's always very likeable, as is his sister Maria. But it's the bad guys who hog all the best lines and most memorable moments.
It's a good movie. I have to admit I wouldn't be hugely disappointed if we never get an Xtremo 2, but these people have proven themselves, dammit, and I'd love to see what they do next. Here's hoping they keep getting to make the sort of thing they obviously love.
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