Gringo
Nash Edgerton's carved out a decent niche for himself working on a variety of US and Australian films as a stunt coordinator or second unit director, coupled with stints wearing a producer and/or director hat on a variety of projects under his production banner Blue Tongue Films. His upcoming FX series Mr. Inbetween is a spin-off of Scott Ryan's rather brilliant 2005 Australian film The Magician, which Nash also produced.
His debut feature in 2008 was The Square, a top notch suburban noir with a hapless man under financial duress at the centre of a complex tale of shifting loyalties, betrayal and murder. It violently tipped its hat towards the Coen brothers Blood Simple and displayed Nash's well-honed genre instincts. In this, his follow-up feature, Edgerton once again places a hapless man under financial strain, smack dab in the centre of a dark, violent and at times hilarious, noir fable.
Harold Soyinka (David Oyelowo) works for a pharmaceutical company called Promethium, struggling in the middle management hamster wheel as his bank account is depleted by an unaffordable mortgage and his wife Bonnie’s (Thandie Newton) fledgling design business. The company CEO, Richard (Joel Edgerton) and co-owner Elaine (Charlize Theron) are singularly awful human beings, who are actively working to sell the company and make as much money as they can in the process. Despite their insistence that all is normal, Harold suspects a merger is in the offing. Even so, he’s asked by his employers to travel with them to Mexico on business and during the trip they involve the unwitting Harold in a shady deal with cartel boss Villegas (Carlos Corona) who then believes Harold to be the boss of the pharmaceutical company Promethium. Things become even more strange when a faked kidnapping becomes a real kidnapping and a mercenary named Mitch (District 9’s Sharlto Copley) is dispatched to extract Harold, only to further entangle him in a violent relay that sees him dragged from one life-threatening scenario to the next, like a dark crime noir-inflected The Big Lebowski crossed with Elmore Leonards’ Get Shorty.
Gringo’s darkly comic performances (particularly Joel Edgerton and Charlize Theron’s venal and vicious pharmaceutical shysters) do make for some funny sequences that are at times punctuated (quite effectively) with brisk, muscular action set-pieces. Nash Edgerton’s stunt background has given him a keen eye for impactful violence, turning even routine ‘car-flip’ scenes into head rattling, bone-splitting ordeals. The cast are all in really fine form and David Oyelowo’s decision to portray Harold (originally scripted as a white American) as a guileless and trusting African immigrant, means he’s even more of a fish-out-of-water and his inability to predict just how despicable his employers are, verges on a wide-eyed naivete that’s played for comedy as well as pathos. All up, Nash Edgerton has constructed a wonderfully visceral and razor-sharp farce that twists genre tropes and pays homage to his influences. See it.