Yet another Mexican movie within the context of Mexico City, pretending to project what goes on there as a reflection of the whole Mexican reality. Film-making in Mexico hasn't changed a bit as far as content from the drug dealer and prostitute movies of the eighties, even though is a little bit more polished (to the point of being pretentious and exclusive). In this movie, as in most recent Mexican filmography, crime (kidnapping in this case) is the only choice for the main male character to get ahead, and the main female character is, yet again, a prostitute. <br /><br />This movie abuses the grotesque element, and I think it's degrading for the main characters in the cast. The main actors must have been in much need of money to go through what they did, taking into consideration that he used non actors, mostly to accentuate, exaggerate and exhibit their physical shortcomings rather than to create and develop characters. You can see how much the director, probably a high class "junior" (because nobody finances his own debut with 50K out of his own pocket), despises and makes fun very sarcastically of the lower classes. <br /><br />As for the rest of the movie, it's deliberately slow and aimless. Whatever meaning a certain shot could have had is diluted by its lack of movement, lenght and ambiguity. Besides, there are a lot of scenes that stop the rhythm and don't contribute to the development of a story a bit. An example could be the scene where he is watching the soccer match and is (seemingly) playing with himself while imitating the player who's talking on TV. I don't understand what the equally grotesque sexual content has to do with the tribulations of the main character. The last thing anybody would be thinking about is sex if they were in the position of "Marcos."<br /><br />And the worst is that there's not much anywhere else to turn to in the Mexican cinema arena nowadays. Good photography wasted, as usual, in a movie without much content. Makes me miss my Mario Almada, or even Alfonso Zayas' movies, which had no more vulgarity than this movie had.