"They devour everything they touch, that type."
On the border between Colombia and Venezuela gasoline is worth fifty times more on one side than it is on the other. This creates a powerful incentive to go against the grain. Gasoline smugglers (pimpineros) jostle for profits with corrupt cops and soldiers, insatiable gangs, the desolate landscape, and unreliable machines. Three brothers working independently as pimpineros find themselves in a downward spiral when one of them goes into debt with an unsavory rival who smuggles not just oil but humans as well.
Purity must die before anyone has a chance of getting free in this tense thriller about corruption, betrayal, and dark secrets. There is a lot of potential here and many exhilarating moments, such as a scene where a woman is dancing with her lover in a fantasy, but things don't gel just right. The film needs just a little extra umph in places. Still, I had a great time watching this.
Director Andrés Baiz, present at this Toronto International Film Festival screening, said he once asked a group of kids about choosing superpowers. They talked about teleporting from one place to another, being invisible, or going back in time. Baiz realized that cinema gives audiences all three powers at once. How true. Pimpinero: Blood and Oil takes us back ten years to the border of Columbia and Venezuela where smugglers and their goods disappear in the darkness.
