Gringo (2018)
Directed by Nash Edgerton
An American businessman with a stake in a pharmaceutical company that's about to go public finds his life is thrown into turmoil by an incident in Mexico.
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It’s reminiscent of the line in “The Fellowship Of The Ring,” where Saruman says to Gandalf, “The friendship of Saruman is not lightly thrown aside.”
The cast has a great good time — Oyelowo, playing a stooge who slowly gets wise over the course of the film, has a chance to loosen up after playing Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma,” and Copley (“District 9,” “Chappie”) is a most engaging wild card, since you don’t know whether his character will follow his murderous or helpful impulses and neither does he.
We also have a former hired killer (“District 9” star Sharlto Copley) and two inept American drug smugglers (Amanda Seyfried, Harry Treadaway), all of whom cross paths with Harold’s increasingly daft adventures.
But as pure comic-action pulp, it at least avoids getting into the scummier regions that such earlier tales of nefarious doings south of the border like Oliver Stone’s “Savages” or Ridley Scott’s “The Counsellor” descended to.
“Gringo” plays a little like a Coen brothers movie without the sense of cosmic jest, or a Steven Soderbergh confection like last year’s “Logan Lucky,” but without Soderbergh’s generosity toward his characters.
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And if you haven’t seen “Hardcore Henry,” I will not accept you raising an eyebrow at my including Sharlto Copley as part of a “good cast.”