Gringo (2018)

Gringo arrived in March of 2018 with a bafflingly overqualified cast and departed almost immediately, grossing eleven million dollars worldwide and finishing outside the top ten. Nash Edgerton directs this Mexico-set caper with the shambling energy of a film that trusts its audience to forgive a great deal. David Oyelowo plays Harold Soyinka, a Chicago executive sent south to shepherd an experimental marijuana pill toward production, who learns in short order that his employers are selling him out, his wife is sleeping with someone else, and a cartel would like a word. He spends the middle of the picture being kidnapped, rescued, kidnapped again, and implanted with a tracking microchip by a mercenary played by Joel Edgerton. It is a great deal of plot for a comedy that never locates its tone.

The narrative engine is corporate betrayal, and it runs clean. Promethium cuts off the cartel to protect a merger, Richard schemes to collect a life insurance payout on his own employee, and Charlize Theron's Elaine ends the film testifying against her co-president and seizing the company. The cynicism is real, and it is served as comedy instead of sermon, which is its own kind of mercy. Harold's status as a Black American adrift in Mexico is signaled by the title and then abandoned. The picture treats it as farce and builds nothing on top of it. The ensemble is multiracial in a way that reads as casting, not argument, and the film seems content to leave the matter there.

Which is to say the film is largely innocent of the cultural preoccupations that define its moment. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental conscience, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent character, no reworking of the historical record. It is too chaotic and too invested in its own convoluted machinery to stop and instruct anyone. Gringo misfires, and it misfires without a thesis. There is something almost restful about that.