Worth: $12.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Leonardo Sbaraglia, Pablo Echarri, Claro Lago, Frederico Luppi, Uma Salduende
Intro:
At the End of The Tunnel twists and turns enough to keep things interesting.
The bank-heist is a tough sell in the modern thriller canon. In 2017, it would be near impossible to break new territory after a slew of immortal heist films throughout the nineties and early noughties — Point Break, Heat, or even the first act of Nolan’s The Dark Knight come to mind. At the End Of The Tunnel isn’t even half as good as these, nor should we expect it to be. There’s no dead president masks in this one, after all. Still, Argentinian director Rodrigo Grande makes a solid attempt at revitalising the genre — throw some bad guys in a tunnel and the (somewhat) good guy in a wheelchair and we have relatively new territory to plunder. The results are mixed.
Joaquin (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is a broken man in more ways than one. He’s paraplegic with the inexplicable loss of his family haunting him. Presumably the circumstances are somehow linked, but he now wiles away the days tinkering with his computers in the basement. Joaquin also happens to live next door to a bank stacked with dirty gangster money. When Berta (Claro Lago) and her mute daughter Betty (Uma Salduende) start renting Joaquin’s room upstairs, the stage is set for thrills and a few spills.
At the End of The Tunnel twists and turns enough to keep things interesting. Pablo Echarri is suitably menacing as Galetero, el jefe of the tunneling criminals. The heist itself is well orchestrated, but other plot points are ham-fisted and occasionally troubling. In the first act, Berta — an exotic dancer — casually stripteases for her new landlord Joaquin on his birthday as a get-to-know-you. By the second act, Joaquin is shooting her up with doggy meds (it’s as bad as it sounds). The third act is the real kicker though, because there’s love at the end of this impossible tunnel.
The juries of several international film festivals would tell you there are good reasons for the jarring moments, but the cognitive dissonance on paper is about the same on screen. Still, it has a grizzly ending worthy of Hollywood and truth be told, if you put Denzel in the wheelchair, At The End Of The Tunnel would come off like many of his paint-by-numbers thrillers. That’s not a bad thing. Those films are perfectly good rainy day fare.
