Anyone
with an ounce of common sense will immediately suspect a leftist guerrilla who
calls his well-armed comrades “missionaries” and refers to himself in the third
person must be seriously bad news. However, as a card-carrying member of the
media, war photographer Avery Taggert will have to find out the hard way. The
hard way will be especially hard in Josh C. Waller’s Camino (trailer
here), which opens this Friday in select
theaters.
Taggert
seems to have a Hemingway complex. She drinks hard, spars with her editor, and
takes every dangerous assignment that comes down the line. Guillermo is the
latest. The Spanish-born socialist revolutionary is far savvier than most of
his ilk when it comes to the press. He is only too happy to have Taggert tag
along with his rag-tag troupe, to snap pictures of them delivering medicine to
poor villagers. However, things get a little complicated when Taggert also
captures a candid shot of Guillermo strangling the young boy who witnessed his
cocaine deal with some of the government’s black ops soldiers.
Shifting
into damage control mode, Guillermo tries to pin the murder and the drugs on
Taggert. His more fanatical and psychotic followers are only too willing to
kill the photo-journalist on his say-so, but the more conscientious “missionaries”
have their doubts. Pretty soon both Taggert and the increasingly unhinged Guillermo
are offing missionaries in a double-sided game of cat-and-mouse.
With
a cast that includes stuntwoman turned thesp Zoë Bell, Timecrimes director Nacho Vigalondo, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’s Sheila Vand, Camino comes fully loaded with cult
movie credibility. Waller and screenwriter Daniel Noah’s jaundiced portrayal of
Guillermo probably will not win the film a lot of critical favors, but it
certainly reflects the reality of Latin America in the 1980s. Frankly, the film
comes perilously close to running off the rails with a head-scratching climax,
but Vigalondo essentially saves it with one of the best line deliveries of the
year. It still doesn’t make much sense, but we’re with it anyway.
As
Taggert, Bell exhibits a quiet forcefulness and legit star power. Clearly, she
can anchor an action movie, if anyone besides Waller will give her the
opportunity. Vigalondo similarly delivers the villainous goods, chewing on the
jungle scenery like its salt water taffy. Although Marianna, the true-believing,
Guillermo-loving revolutionary does not require a lot of nuance, it further establishes
Vand’s range, following her knock-out work in Girl Walks. Kevin Pollak also does his thing, occasionally
walking-on to get a few laughs as Taggert’s sarcastic editor.
