I tend to find it very offputting when a filmmaker too blatantly and liberally copies the style of another in their movie. The tail end of the 90’s were filled with rafts of uninspired attempts to recreate the style of Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez, with a very, very slim few coming even remotely close. They talked the talk, to a degree, but didn’t have the necessary substance to walk the walk. The first few scenes of El Gringo gave me cause for dread, as it so desperately tries to crib Robert Rodriguez’s signature style that I thought it must surely be the result of some ungodly, A Clockwork Orange-esque experiment where the director had his eyelids clamped open and was forced to watch Desperado on a loop for 3 months. I was only able to persevere because I was intrigued by the movie’s lead, Scott Adkins, the British born action movie star whose star has steadily risen over the last few years to the point where he is currently starring in the Katheryn Bigelow’s Osama slaying, Oscar bait drama Zero Dark Thirty. Being that Adkins is a Brit whose profession is pretending to kick folks to bits, he’s been favourably compared with the mighty Stath (Jason Statham to non-nerds). Being a big fan of Statham and hugely proud that the world’s premier action star is one of our own, I was very keen to see if Adkins is indeed cut from the same blood spattered cloth.
Aside from a little twist here and there, the plot of El Gringo is simplicity itself. The Man (Scott Adkins) has a great big bag of cash in a Mexican town that quickly proves to be the last place you’d want to be a stranger with a great big bag of cash. Cue lots of colourful, nefarious types popping up to pinch The Man’s loot. There’s a little more too it than that, but it’s certainly not a movie that’s overburdened with plot, which is actually one of the many things I loved about it.
Some deathly serious critics could pick holes in El Gringo all day long. As I mentioned before, it steals a lot of stylistic tics, it also looks cheap, it contains some dodgy performances, the score is quite annoying, but these are quibbles really, I’d rather concentrate on the surprisingly large amount of things the movie gets right.
A) Scott Adkins. He’s not quite as charismatic as The Stath yet, but once you get over his striking and distracting resemblance to brit TV comic/actor Rob Brydon (he REALLY looks like him) he’s pretty excellent. He certainly has the athletic chops, he’s a convincing movie ass kicker with some genuinely impressive martial arts skills, but he’s also quite funny in a deadpan kinda way and generally just a very likeable presence, I can see him going far.
B) Squibs! Ahhh, sweet squibs. For those who don’t know what they are, they’re the little explosive blood packs that movies used to use for gunshots. They’ve sadly been replaced in recent years with horrible, fake looking CGI, so any action flick with plenty of squibage is good by me.
C) Bodycount. El Gringo leaves a whole mess of bloody bodies on the floor in its brief running time, it’s almost gleefully violent, full of eye popping, chunky headshots and various other highly entertaining atrocities. In an age where the new Die Hard movie is diluted to such a degree that young mothers can take a four year old along to see it, it’s down to the DTV action movie to serve up the ultra-violence, and El Gringo delivers.
D) Christian Slater. Not sure what the poor guy did to be relegated from proper movie stardom to DTV hell, but I’ve always liked him, he makes the most of his totally unexpected cameo in El Gringo and it’s good to see him in something that doesn’t stink.
E) Pure fun. Not one second of El Gringo takes itself remotely seriously, it’s there purely to entertain, and does a pretty damn fine job, there’s even a few laughs to be had in the farcical nature of some of Adkins’ predicaments.
And that’s El Gringo, I could easily pick holes in it, but if you’re after a totally unpretentious, squibtastic bullet fest with a game lead who knows how to bring the pain, give it a shot, you’ll have a ball.
El Gringo is out on DVD 25th February 2013.
Director: Eduardo Rodriguez
Writer: Jonathan W. Stokes (screenplay)
Stars: Scott Adkins, Petar Bachvarov, Zahary Baharov
Country: USA
Film Rating: 
