REVIEW: Exotic La Soga Succumbs to Standard-Issue Crime Clichés

A film loaded with interest that somehow fails to be interesting, La Soga is inspired by true events and not much else. A crime drama set in a satellite village orbiting Santiago, Dominican Republic, and occasionally New York City, it tells the story of Luisito (Manny Perez, who also wrote the film), an assassin-for-hire working for the local police and the American government to cleanse drug-dealing U.S. deportees from the streets. Social, moral, and personal themes abound, but are mostly left wandering shoeless among the extras, as Perez and American director Josh Crook get caught up in playing gangster film, Dominican-style.

Or Dominican location, anyway. Shot in Baitoa, the village where Perez was born and raised, the movie -- thanks largely to a splurge on 35 mm -- looks splendid, the colors popsicle hot and the textures vivid. Even sweat looks silky in 35 mm. But the feel is frustratingly generic, a tenth generation dub of City of God with all of the cock-fighting exotica and lurid gore but without the social insights, brilliant characters, or bravura plays on convention.

Luisito is known as "La Soga" to locals and "La Slo Mo" to me. A laser-eyed character with a full mouth and a fighter's build and low-headed, wary carriage, he moves with extreme deliberation that often lapses into actual slow motion. It's a trick he learned early, as evidenced by the regular sepia-toned flashbacks to his childhood. Through them we learn of Luisito's first kiss, first romantic disappointment, and first graphic slaughter of a pig -- the basics. It also becomes clear that Luisito is not in the assassin business only for the money; his father, a butcher, was randomly slaughtered by a drug dealer named Rafa (Paul Calderon) while Luisito looked on, helpless. A vendetta was born, along with an alert but oddly calibrated sense of justice.

The murder fueled his general hatred of drug dealers and the criminal element that ruled Santiago during a particularly wretched stretch of the 1980s. Several statements are made to suggest that Luisito believes he is operating as a vigilante, righting wrongs that the broken legal system cannot address. The problem with the criminals who make their bones in the United States before being deported back home, says General Colon (Juan Fernandez), the shady cop who recruits young Luisito to his death squad, is that they get this crazy idea that they have rights. Rafa escaped to the United States after the murder of Luisito's father, and is frustratingly out of reach, for now. Luisito scans his assigned list of hits every month, hoping Rafa's number has come up, but has to settle for icing non-specific dealers in public and dragging their bodies through the streets instead.

Ruthless when he's on the clock, Luisito is a teddy bear in the presence of his childhood crush Jenny (Denise Qiuñones), who has returned to Baitos after an unsatisfying stint as a social worker in New York. The rekindling of their relationship feels forced, one anonymous hinge of many in a plot whose every door opens onto Luisito's increasingly uninteresting, single-minded existence. From discovering "who he really is" to "understanding his plight" to "making a touching, ambivalent show of support," every beat of their relationship -- of this film -- feels mapped out, eager for its moment to arrive. In masterful hands, a similarly rhythmic phenomenon might inspire a kind of relaxed security in the viewer, and confidence in the maestro. Here, because those beats don't feel determined by Crook himself, it breeds restlessness and, ultimately, disengagement.