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Days of Grace – review Days of Grace – review
(about 17 hours later)
Violence, nihilism and despair are the keynotes of Everardo Gout's brutal Mexican thriller. The title refers to that unofficial grace period that operates in football-crazy Mexico during the World Cup, when both the bad guys and the cops take time off, being simply too glued to the TV coverage to ply their respective trades. The action flashes headspinningly backwards and forwards in Mexico City between three World Cups during the last decade, 2002, 2006 and 2010 – sometimes, uncomfortably, the football commentator has to keep saying what year it is – and the storylines unfold in parallel. Tenoch Huerta plays Lupe, a tough if somewhat fanatical young cop who is not afraid to use his firearm to tackle the bad guys or indeed terrify errant youngsters into sticking to the straight and narrow path of law-abiding righteousness. He attracts the attention of the hatchet-faced Comandante (José Sefami) who lets him know that the "days of grace" period during the World Cup might be just the time to launch an unexpected all-out attack on the gangsters. Meanwhile, in later eras, the Mexican plague of kidnapping continues to blight the city and it seems that Lupe's tough approach with youth may have been counterproductive. Days of Grace is comparable to José Padilha's Brazilian drama Elite Squad (2007), though with less of a fetish for the uniformed lawmen. More obvious is Gout's debt to Fernando Meirelles's City of God (2002) especially in one time-lapse sequence in a criminal's apartment. It's a confident, well-made film that ends up in a blind alley of cynicism. Violence, nihilism and despair are the keynotes of Everardo Gout's brutal Mexican thriller. The title refers to that unofficial grace period that operates in football-crazy Mexico during the World Cup, when both the bad guys and the cops take time off, being simply too glued to the TV coverage to ply their respective trades. The action flashes headspinningly backwards and forwards in Mexico City between three World Cups during the last decade, 2002, 2006 and 2010 – sometimes, uncomfortably, the football commentator has to keep saying what year it is – and the storylines unfold in parallel.
Tenoch Huerta plays Lupe, a tough if somewhat fanatical young cop who is not afraid to use his firearm to tackle the bad guys or indeed terrify errant youngsters into sticking to the straight and narrow path of law-abiding righteousness. He attracts the attention of the hatchet-faced Comandante (José Sefami) who lets him know that the "days of grace" period during the World Cup might be just the time to launch an unexpected all-out attack on the gangsters. Meanwhile, in later eras, the Mexican plague of kidnapping continues to blight the city and it seems that Lupe's tough approach with youth may have been counterproductive. Days of Grace is comparable to José Padilha's Brazilian drama Elite Squad (2007), though with less of a fetish for the uniformed lawmen. More obvious is Gout's debt to Fernando Meirelles's City of God (2002) especially in one time-lapse sequence in a criminal's apartment. It's a confident, well-made film that ends up in a blind alley of cynicism.