What a cast . . . and what a terrible waste of their talent
HERE’S a brace of films worth avoiding, albeit for very different reasons.
Gringo is a horribly misbegotten stab at a black comedy-thriller, directed by former stuntman Nash Edgerton.
It features David Oyelowo, Charlize Theron, Thandie Newton, Sharlto Copley, Amanda Seyfried and the director’s brother Joel Edgerton, and I recommend it only if you want to marvel at how a talented cast could be so spectacularly wasted.
Oyelowo plays Harold, a mildmannered middle-manager, originally from Nigeria, in a Chicago pharmaceuticals company. Edgerton is his obnoxious boss, Richard, who affects to be Harold’s friend while having an affair with his wife (Thandie Newton).
In league with an equally unpleasant colleague, Elaine (Theron), with whom he is also having sex, Richard has a dodgy scheme going with, yes, a Mexican drugs cartel.
This requires the unsuspecting Harold to make regular business trips to Mexico, where, after discovering that he is likely to lose his job, he decides to fake his own kidnapping and run off with the ransom money.
Naturally, things go terribly wrong, not least because, according to a screenplay that might have been strung together from a series of Donald Trump’s tweets, Mexico is populated only by petty thieves and murderous brigands.
In the unlikely event of Guillermo del Toro subjecting himself to Gringo, the Oscar-winning director of The Shape Of Water might wonder why he wasted his breath on stage the other night, when he suggested that his native country is not, in fact, an unsophisticated backwater.
It is here. But such caricatures could be tolerated if they served a funny plot and snappy dialogue.
Gringo tries strenuously to extract comedy from murder, torture and embezzlement, and Oyelowo mugs his heart out at the centre of a ludicrously convoluted narrative, but in the end the only effective joke is on those who have forked out for a cinema ticket.
Walk Like A Panther is not much better. It’s a riotously unfunny wrestling comedy set in Yorkshire, which plays out like a feeble half-hour sitcom stretched, like Big Daddy’s leotard, almost beyond endurance. Stephen Graham is Mark, the landlord of a village pub, the Half Nelson, which used to be home to a wrestling troupe called the Panthers back in the golden age of the grapple game.
Mark’s own father (Dave Johns) was a Panther, and Mark has always yearned to be one himself.
A decent cast also includes Stephen Tompkinson, Julian Sands and Sue Johnston. Maybe they had their arms twisted, Mick McManus-style, into signing up for a feelgood British comedy in the manner of The Full Monty or Brassed Off.
BuT after about the first 45 seconds, which contain some enjoyable clips from the heyday of ITV’s wrestling coverage, the film falls flat on its back.
And why a Yorkshire village should be home to such a melting-pot of regional accents (I counted Scouse, Geordie, Yorkshire, Mancunian and East Midland) only London-based film producers, who evidently consider the North to be one big-hearted land somewhere the other side of Milton Keynes, can tell us.
Anyway, when an impromptu fight in the pub goes viral on social media, Mark and his chums see an opportunity to save the pub from the nasty brewery boss (Tompkinson). Thrillingly, they make plans to bring the Panthers back from the dead. The script, alas, remains lifeless.
Gringo (15) Verdict: Offensively unfunny ★✩✩✩✩ Walk Like A Panther (12A) Verdict: Merely unfunny ★✩✩✩✩