HOLA MEXICAN FILM FESTIVAL: The title, for the literal minded at least, could be a disappointment or a dead promise, but the fact is, Saving Private Perez isn’t a Spielberg send-up nor a WWII parody. It’s a genre satire, however, aimed at taking down the pomposity of men on a mission flicks, and gangster movies, particularly Scarface (the De Palma version not the Hawks) and its imitators. The plot, at least at face value, suggests a movie with politics on its mind: a powerful Mexican drug cartel mogul leads a group of miscreants into Iraq to rescue his soldier brother, MIA, thought to be held captive by the enemy. Still, this movie is no bitter yuk-fest treatise on the perceived failures – military and cultural – of an unpopular war.
Like the barbs that lit up Monty Python and Mel Brooks movies at their best, Saving Private Perez ridicules certain genre tropes, as in character plot and especially style – the gangster tough guys here cross-dress in costumes somewhere between night-club cowboy and mariachi band. The film’s better gags make fun out of the excessive, over-determined styling in action movie technique; there’s one bit here where Julian (Miguel Rodarte), the movie’s bad-guy hero, takes on a group of face-less Iraqis. He launches himself into space and floating in slow-mo fires off a deadly salvo"¦ except his flight goes on and on and on (like he’s on wires, which of course he probably is). This is one of the more extroverted of the film’s jokes; with more of them the movie would have been a lot funnier, instead of just silly, which it is, most of the time.
Actually, what’s admirable in the film doesn’t have much to do with its moment-to-moment experience; it’s in the ambition of director Beto Gomez and his co-screenwriter Francisco Payo Gonzalez. That is, they seem to want to satirise a tone, that earnest feeing that so dominates a certain kind of action picture. The dominant image here is one of (supposedly) dangerous men, trapped on a perilous journey, exchanging looks for a long time"¦ and wondering what they will do next. This gives the film a sort of flat trajectory; it’s so relentlessly deadpan and low-key it’s like watching a rehearsal where the actors are still working on their timing and watching to see which lines will fly. Gomez and co. know their genre well; Julian’s men are humiliated, and chased by all (including, and especially, by the Americans) and find themselves lost, blown up and helpless throughout, even at one point getting doused in oil after being trapped in a pipeline (an image that has more satirical bite than anything else in he movie).
Some of the time it works; I especially like the way some gags are launched with surprise as incidental bits of business. (A car horn that plays the first few bars of The Godfather theme, but in Tijuana Brass style; or when US forces, unaware of the identity of Julian’s men after they turn up in Iraq, discover a CD of music left behind in a fire fight and conclude, on hearing the bright tumble of horns coming out of their speakers, that this new insurgency must be the work of 'Mexicans").
The film, though, is coy and sentimental and it kills the comedy finally. The casting doesn’t help; Rodarte, who seems a fine actor, has no menace even though his character is described as Mexico’s most dangerous man. At the beginning when his mother, an invalid in a nursing home, has him pledge to rescue his brother, Julian seems more like a bored bank manager than a vulnerable tough guy. Worse, soon after, he’s saddled with one of the film’s lame lines: 'Where the Hell is Iraq?" he asks, seated at the head of a massive conference table in a set that’s more James Bond than Scarface. It’s an ironic joke about political alienation, especially at a time when Mexico is wracked with its own issues (many traced to the drug war!) Trouble is, it makes Julian sound like a goof and the movie like fluff, even before it gets going.
