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Intacto
Spain 2001
produced by Fernando Bovaira (executive), Enrique López Lavigne (executive), Sebastián Álvarez (supervising) for Canal+, Telecinco, Sociedad General de Cine (= SOGECINE), Tenerife Film Commission
directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
starring Leonardo Sbaraglia, Eusebio Poncela, Mónica López, Antonio Dechent, Max Von Sydow, Guillermo Toledo, Alber Ponte, Andrea San Vicenta, Jesús Noguero, Ramón Serrada, Marisa Lull, Luis Mesonero, Pedro Beitia, Jaime Losada, Susana Lazaro, Iván Aledo, Paz Gómez, Marta Gil, Pere Eugeni Font, Ramón Esquinas, Chema de Miguel
written by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Andrés M.Koppel, music by Lucio Godoy
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Max Von Sydow runs a casino, & he's pretty successfull at that,
for he has the gift to suck other people's luck from them (henceforth
called the gift). The only person he trusts is his adopted son
Federico (Eusebio Poncela), who is also gifted. But when Federico
decides to leave him, Von Sydow sucks the gift out of him (he can do
that) & has him beaten up & thrown out of a car somewhere in the
Pampas (he can do that too, hey, he runs a casino). 7 years
later, Federico is in desperate search of other people with the gift to
get back at his foster-father, but most of the candidates prove to be
failures ... until he finds a petty criminal who is also the sole
survivor of an airplane crash, Stefan (Leonardo Sbaraglia). Always on
the run from the police (especially policewoman Maria Lopez, who also
has the gift), Federico takes Stefan to a series of increasingly bizarre
games for high & higher stakes - the highest of all being the
trading among the gifted for the luck of so-called normal people, thatr
luck being symbolized by their polaroids. The most bizarre game, by the
way is a group of gifted people running through the woods blindfolded
& with bound hands, only their luck can take them through unscathed
- a game which Stefan loses. Still, in the end, Federico manages to get
Stefan to a final confrontaion with Von Sydow - whose luck started when
he was the only survivor from a Nazi concentration camp, & who has
now drawers full of polaroids -, this being a game of Russian roulette,
but with 5 bullets in the gun ! But then there's also gifted policewoman
Maria Lopez, who hasn't given up the search, & in a shootout in the
end both she & Von Sydow die ... Every now & again,
this movie just tries to be a little too clever for its own good, trying
to sneak in something true about luck & happiness, but
actually having incredibly little of importance to say about it, while
other scenes are just simple genre-101. What this movie actually is, is
just a reasonably entertaining, sometimes pretentious genre-film, but
definitely nothing special. I've seen much worse, though.
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