Review of ‘No Peace for the Wicked’

In favor, by Nuria Vidal

Jose Coronado is Santos Trinidad, a failed and violent police inspector. He drinks a lot, and one night of drunkenness and frustration, he finds himself involved in a triple crime with some Colombian drug dealers. Solving the case in which he is the main suspect will be his priority as he plunges into a spiral of guilt and redemption that will lead him to discover the ins and outs of power and corruption. Urbizu returns to the cinema, and he does so hand in hand with Michel Gaztambide and Jose Coronado, his two accomplices in ‘La Caja 507’ (2002) and ‘La vida punta’ (2003). ‘There will be no peace for the wicked’ has a spectacular start. His first 15 minutes, in which we see Coronado lost that night, are, without a doubt, the best that Urbizu has shot in his entire career. Maintaining that tone to the end would have made No Peace… a masterpiece. I don’t ask that much of Urbizu: I think that beginning is so good that it is already a gift in the context of our cinema, in which it seems that there is only room for experimentation or conventionalism. Urbizu shows that sometimes resorting to the most classic genres usually gives the best results.

Against, by Pere Vall

Not even the most trained background narrator (and Urbizu is) is prepared to delay the adventures of Jose Coronado’s character so much in a film that, apart from other defects, lacks to shoot towards other plots with as much aim as in the crusade center of Santos Trinidad. When the collateral characters fail due to a lack of definition, interest and forcefulness (and it’s not exactly the fault of the actors, all of them great, starting with a surprising Helena Miquel), then the whole falls apart and, as a spectator who misses more tension and live the danger in a more direct way, you are forced to cling to the solitary odyssey of the policeman facing himself and his vices. And you leave Despite everything, Urbizu retains his extraordinary sense of rhythm and his passion for the underworld, and there are flashes of auteur thriller. But not even those devastating final shots make us forget that we have let our guard down for much of the plot. Tension = attention, here is the dilemma. Too much peace for the evil spectator.

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DATA SHEET

Address: Enrique Urbizu Distribution: Jose Coronado, Rodolfo Sancho, Juan Jose Artero, Helena Miquel Original title: There will not be peace for the evil ones Country: Spain Year: 2011 Release date: 09-23-2011 Gender: thriller Screenplay: Enrique Urbizu, Michel Gaztambide
Duration: 96min

Synopsis: Madrid, year two thousand and something. One Sunday, another Sunday, police inspector Santos Trinidad on his way home, already very drunk, is involved in a triple murder. But there is a witness who manages to escape… and could incriminate him. Santos Trinidad begins the manhunt, undertakes an investigation aimed at locating and eliminating the witness. Meanwhile Judge Chacón, in charge of the investigation of the triple crime, meticulously advances in the search for the murderer. Both Santos and Chacón will discover that nothing is what it seems and what begins as a simple case of drug trafficking, will lead to something much more dangerous. Only Santos seems to be able to prevent it, as long as Judge Chacón does not manage to stop him first.