I would have rated this movie higher but it had one of the most maddening endings I have ever seen in a movie. Not that the rest of the movie was that good. Without the bad ending I would have only increased my rating to 5 or 6.
This is one of those movies where the main characters start off in a bad situation and then do one stupid thing after another until their hole is so deep there is no way out. One of the main characters is an attorney who has lost his license and has gotten involved with an ambulance-chasing outfit run by gangsters. The other is an emergency room doctor who shoots up in the bathroom so that she can cope with the long hours of her job.
In most suspense thrillers, the formula goes like this. The good guys get badgered, threatened, and chased by the bad guys, narrowly escaping death, but in the end winning out, usually in some ingenious way. If you happen to like this formula, don't go see Carancho because the people who made it threw the formula out the window.
**SPOILERS** As our heroes are driving away from a climactic gun battle having miraculously survived a horrific car accident and a shower of bullets coming through their windshield, they are hit by another car. The guy ends up dead and the girl's condition is apparently serious. The screen goes black--end of movie. I don't know about you, but to me the tragic ending is becoming a cliché in movies. I think that killing off a main character at the end is an overused trick some filmmakers use to make their movies more dramatic or artsy. OK, I agree that filmmakers WERE following the film noir formula: If the hero does something unforgivable, he must die. But that explanation of the ending only leads to another problem. Why did Sosa kill his boss in cold blood? Sure, his boss had Sosa's girlfriend slapped around, but it was out of character for Sosa to beat the guy to to a bloody pulp. Sosa is a petty criminal, but not a killer. In fact, it seems that the main reason for having Sosa murder his boss and having his girlfriend be a drug addict was so that they would be "dirty" enough to be killed or suffer greatly at the end.
This is one of those movies where the main characters start off in a bad situation and then do one stupid thing after another until their hole is so deep there is no way out. One of the main characters is an attorney who has lost his license and has gotten involved with an ambulance-chasing outfit run by gangsters. The other is an emergency room doctor who shoots up in the bathroom so that she can cope with the long hours of her job.
In most suspense thrillers, the formula goes like this. The good guys get badgered, threatened, and chased by the bad guys, narrowly escaping death, but in the end winning out, usually in some ingenious way. If you happen to like this formula, don't go see Carancho because the people who made it threw the formula out the window.
**SPOILERS** As our heroes are driving away from a climactic gun battle having miraculously survived a horrific car accident and a shower of bullets coming through their windshield, they are hit by another car. The guy ends up dead and the girl's condition is apparently serious. The screen goes black--end of movie. I don't know about you, but to me the tragic ending is becoming a cliché in movies. I think that killing off a main character at the end is an overused trick some filmmakers use to make their movies more dramatic or artsy. OK, I agree that filmmakers WERE following the film noir formula: If the hero does something unforgivable, he must die. But that explanation of the ending only leads to another problem. Why did Sosa kill his boss in cold blood? Sure, his boss had Sosa's girlfriend slapped around, but it was out of character for Sosa to beat the guy to to a bloody pulp. Sosa is a petty criminal, but not a killer. In fact, it seems that the main reason for having Sosa murder his boss and having his girlfriend be a drug addict was so that they would be "dirty" enough to be killed or suffer greatly at the end.