La 4ª Compañía

An important denunciation biography, but a boring film, at least in its first half, almost boring, except for the little song of "Chaves" and his Ha-ra-ra, which in 79 was the theme of the Mexican crowd ... The second half tb leaves something to be desired, but it gives a slight improvement with the more violent and revolting development, the ending with the outcome of the interesting survivors, but the film did not bring me enough empathy for me to get emotional ...

The film recreates a true story of an American football team of the Santa Marta Acatitla prison at Mexico city in 1979. It was filmed in the original prison with mixing of actors and real prisoners (it is possible to distinguish the real prisoners by the personal care of the faces). The story shows the corruption of the Secretary of public security in Mexico city at that time and the hypocrisy of the system to show in the society the social rehabilitation of criminals by playing sports (American football). Behind the fake appearance, the director leads a criminal band using the football team to keep control of the prison and using their criminal skills for car robberies, bank assaults and jewelry stores outside the prison. The team also fight to get conditional freedom if they win the final of the tournament and if they follow the rules of the prison director. The film use pictures and personages of real former politicians with not explicit information that just have sense for people with mexican history knowkedge of this period of time but can be a sequence loss of facts for people of other countries.

This is a good film and I'd rate it higher if it made more sense. There is a good story here, pretty good acting and good characters. The problem is that at times the movie is hard to follow. Some things just don't make sense and they don't go too deep into the backgrounds of the characters so you don't know why they are who they are.

Netflix has been steadily releasing original films that are intriguing to say the least. I completely disagree with Steven Spielberg that Netflix shouldn't be allowed to win an Oscar. He just needs to put in more effort because some these new and hungry directors are making better films than him. That being said this is no Academy Award contender but it is shot, acted, color graded, and conveyed pretty well. It is in Spanish, it is based on a true story, it is about corruption in a prison, but what it isn't, is most valuable in deciding whether to watch or not.

THIS IS NOT!!!: Blood In, Blood Out Any version of The Longest Yard A movie about football(it barely even shows 5 minutes top of gameplay) A well scripted film A film about one single idea or one single goal or one single enthusiastic protagonist This IS: a film to watch if you love foreign films and Netflix originals interested in prison stories A movie with a cringe-worthy 20 minute ending