If the title doesn’t quite do the trick, the still to the right should tell you all you need to know when figuring out whether Ernesto Diaz Espinoza’s new film Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman is for you.
It’s a wantonly corney, sub-Rodriguez affair that transposes 70s blaxploitation to modern day Chile and plonks a Grand Theft Auto vibe on top of it – a number of the scenes track cars through traffic from behind the rear window.
You hear a lot of complaints that modern action films ever more closely resemble video games: this one goes out of its way to – but the superimposition of the GTA look on a dented toyota stuck in Satiago rush hour traffic is kind of the point – in any case it’s an amusing conceit.
Matias Oviedo has fun as geeky DJ thrust reluctantly in between dastardly contract-killing mobster Che Longana (Jorge Alis) (amusingly subtitled as “Che Sausage”) and his uzi toting ex-moll (Fernanda Urrejola), who signs off her texts “MGW”. Now that’s class. Actually – given that “Machine Gun Woman”, in Spanish, is Mujer Metralleta, that’s some sort of weird continuity prolapse – but it’s cool all the same.
Urrejola is predictably magnetic in the role – with a body and clobber like that, it’d be hard not to be – and while Bring Me The Head of the Machine Gun Woman isn’t quite as funny as by rights it ought to be, and the editing is a bit rough in places, the appropriately pulsating cheese of Rocco’s soundtrack keeps everything well oiled and moving along: at 75 minutes there’s certainly no chance to get bored.
Good stuff.
Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman is in cinemas 27th September 2013.
Director: Ernesto Diaz Espinoza
Stars: Fernanda Urrejola, Matias Oviedo, Jorge Alis
Runtime: 75 mins
Country: Chile
Film Rating: 
