Heroic Losers (2019)

A group of small-town Argentine neighbors pool their savings to reopen a bankrupt agricultural cooperative, only to have a bank manager and a lawyer relieve them of the money on the eve of the 2001 corralito. What follows is a heist, executed with the patient craft of men who have watched How to Steal a Million one too many times. Sebastián Borensztein directs this adaptation of Eduardo Sacheri's novel with a warm, unhurried hand, and the cast, led by Ricardo Darín, works through the mechanics of the caper like a well-drilled ensemble that has done this before. The film is pleasant. It is also long, and the wind-up consumes more of the running time than the payoff can justify.

The political charge here is real but narrow. The villains are a corrupt banker and a predatory attorney who convert a loan into dollars and withdraw the cash before the freeze, leaving the townspeople to absorb the loss. The film's sympathies sit squarely with the cooperative, the collective, the little man against the financial elite, and that gives the whole enterprise an eat-the-rich flavor that is difficult to miss. It is not, however, a lecture. The moral about solidarity and institutional corruption arrives through plot and character, and the tone stays genial throughout. Nobody stands before a whiteboard to explain the sins of capital.

On the other markers, the film is a clean slate. The ensemble is a natural Argentine cast for an Argentine story, and the picture takes no interest in identity, gender, sexuality, ecology, or the politics of the body. It is a period piece that uses 2001 as a backdrop for a crowd-pleaser, not as a platform. We are left with a competent, amiable caper that flatters its audience's suspicion of banks and asks nothing more of them than two hours and a willingness to root for the neighbors. There are worse ways to spend an evening. There are also shorter ones.