A Man of Action

Despite the interesting premise, the plot fell flat after the intriguing opening sequence. The story starts in 1962, with main character Lucio Urtubia and girlfriend reaching the Paris airport with a bag full of cash. Costumes and set look spot on and the audience is left wondering what will happen next, since the police is in hot pursuit.

There follows the first annoying flashback to 20 years previously, in Spain with teenage Lucio attempting and failing his first bank robbery to help his sick father. Move forward 10 years and Lucio is in Paris, joining his sister and working as a builder. On his construction site, Lucio meets some anarchists who introduce him to the doctrine and Lucio decides to "expropriate" bank money to help comrades in need, with the help of more skilled anarchist robber Quico.

At this stage the timeline starts to get muddles, with Lucio meeting Anne, the love of his life, robbing banks and eventually getting caught and incarcerated, then out again for another round that includes falsifying banknotes and finally printing fake travellers cheques.

The actor playing Lucio looks much older than a twenty-something in the section taking place in 1952 and still much older than girlfriend Anne, even 10 years later. Also, he's not a particularly good actor and seems to be sleepwalking through the movie. Most un-engaging, gets a couple of stars for costumes and sets.

Its a film full of entertainment, its full of funny action, and its full of stuff and gadgets that belongs to the era of time. I notice that the police used a peugout just like the one i was born into and thats cool...

its environment of autentic caracters makes me smile over and again, its rude and witty ways to slide out of the polices strongholds are just amazing, the plotspeed is up to your thyroid gland, and the actors casted for this french/spanish/navarranian/basque/catalonian anarchistic freestyler of a biographical drama is just brilliant.

So if you want to lay back to the 1960's paris environment, be my guest, the grumpy old man recommends, and catch me if you can.

The first word to come to mind after finishing the movie is decent. That might not be the desirable outcome of anybody's moviemaking, but we've all seen much worse. The story is loosely based on a real person, anarchist and rebel Lucio Urtubia. We follow back and forth his path for 40 years. Nobody seems to like banks anymore, so in my book if anyone can make fools of bankers, more power to them. Unfortunately, the ultimate price is always paid by people like us, nickeled and dimed to death by them. And when all the dishonesty and greed catches up with them, we save them with generous bailouts. Decent movie, workmanlike, predictable, but not much more.

A Man of Action is a biopic of Spanish bank robber/counterfeiter/anarchist Lucio Urtubia. Set primarily in the 60s and 70s, this movie attempts to get the viewer to empathise with Urtubia who is presented as a 'modern day Robin Hood' combined with activist, intent on 'bringing down the system' - most notably American style capitalism.

If you want a taste of the political angle, Che Guevara is portrayed in the movie as some sort of superstar.

As backstory, Urtubia is given motive for his actions via a childhood experience of a local bank refusing to give him a loan to buy morphine for his ailing father. How heartless and cruel of the local bank manager to do his job and protect local people's hard-earned money.

Did Urtubia's family not have any friends that could assist them? Instead of attempting to rob the bank, wouldn't it have made more sense to appropriate some morphine directly? Bad decisions fuel drama, but they are less effective at generating empathy for a character.

To be fair to Urtubia, he was also fleeing the fascist dictatorship present in Spain at the time, so in context his extremism is perhaps more forgivable.

For me, the best thing about Urtubia was, unlike many contemporary anarchists and activists, he actually built things that people can appreciate.

He worked as an ordinary builder for most of his life. He also gave away a large portion of the money he stole, although the movie doesn't expand much on who or what this money was intended for ('the cause'). It also suggests that he and his team kept a third of the proceeds for themselves - which seems to go against the real life Urtubia's comments that he never personally profited and hence 'wasn't really a thief'.

The film presents him as impetuous, naive, and rather simple, but resourceful and with decent intentions. I would suggest he was also utterly deluded. He should've stuck to the day job.

As for the movie in general, it's average in all departments. There's some interesting period detail and the pace is well handled. It's watchable, but hopefully not too many viewers will find it 'inspiring'.

Greed takes as many shapes as Satan supposedly does, and looking at political ideologies through the dollar lens reduces everything to a simple devilish financial scam! When a Spanish entrepreneur is recruited into an anarchist 'organisation', combined with his hatred of banks, he concocts a plan to destabilise the American dollar. Even Che Guevarra said that that was too hard!

As it's all based on a true story type film, the ridiculousness of the escapades feel more real than they should! Clumsy, near-sighted, or just plain incompetent, the government forces trying to catch the criminals are constantly outwitted and ridiculed at every turn. The French setting aside, the comparison to Pink Panther's bumbling detective is undeniable.

The anti-imperial-Americana that Spain's Francoist education imparted on these Spaniards living in France imbues the story with a sense of David vs. Goliath. The one-eyed giant, in this case, is a multinational bank trying to make Traveller's Cheques popular at all costs. By clever cooperation and Robin Hood-ish intentions, the small group of people (whom do not like being told what to do) follow the bricklaying Spaniard's every plan, until the bank in question gets wind of the operation.

The battle of wits is minimal as both parties are treading uncharted waters. One is creating a system to benefit the peak of the pyramid while the other does not want to be a brick in its slanted walls, although both think more about themselves than 'the masses'!

Are we just beasts of burden for those that demand everybody do what they did as men (or women or whatever) of action? It seemed the banks needed to be robbed by the poor, foreign bricklayer to support the poorer workers, and the curious French detective had to succumb to the Bank's influence, as if they all had a part to play to unburden the masses of any heavy lifting, in the thinking department! Anarchy, as depicted in this film, never looked so organised and effective in creating wealth for its leaders! If I wasn't aware of the history, it would seem the criminals in this film had more capitalist ideals than trying to put a wrench in the big cog of American progress.