A small-time dreamer, already down on his luck, loses $500,000 he doesn't have to gangsters who give him exactly seven days to pay them back or else in Mexican writer-director Fernando Kalife's good-natured crime comedy.
Behind on the rent and unable to get work, freelance concert promoter Claudio Caballero (Eduardo Arroyuelo) persuades his long-suffering girlfriend, Gloria (Martha Higareda), to surreptitiously borrow half a million dollars of her parents' savings so he can place a can't-miss wager on the outcome of an upcoming soccer game at a betting club owned by the Monterey-based Zamacona crime family. Inevitably, Claudio's team loses. The good news is that he smuggled the money back to Gloria while the game was in progress, which is also the bad news: He can't pay up. Kneeling on the floor with no fewer than three guns pointed at his head, Claudio comes up with an idea: He claims to be putting together a U2 concert — surely everyone heard on TV that the legendary Irish band was coming to Mexico? — and will soon have more than enough cash to pay up. The ploy works only because Tony Zamacona (Jaime Camil), big boss Zamacona's (Roberto D'Amico) only son, happens to be the biggest U2 fan ever — he's even got bobbleheads of the band on his dashboard. Of course, though U2 is indeed playing Mexico City, they're not coming to Monterey, and even if they were, Claudio has no in with the band's management and has never put together a show on that scale. With his life on the line, he appeals to Virgilio Garza (Julio Bracho), who used to be in the big-time concert-promotion business with Claudio's late brother, Frederico. With Virgilio's contacts and some surprising assistance from Tony, who's not the stone-cold leg-breaker he at first appears, Claudio might just be able to pull off the apparently impossible coup of actually bringing U2 to Monterey — if he can stop crooked promoter Pepe Cobo (Alex Hank) from stealing the gig out from under him.
Kalife's modest but engaging picture drags a little in the middle as Claudio tries to round up investors from a list of eccentric rich people, but Arroyuelo and Camil share an easy chemistry that lends real charm to the unlikely friendship that develops between the depressed, insecure Claudio and the brash, hedonistic Tony. Kalife, himself a hardcore U2 fan who studied screenwriting at USC, wrote the script without U2's participation. A fortuitous connection between costar Camil's family and U2 frontman Bono (by way of supermodel Naomi Campbell) helped Kalife secure existing concert footage of the band performing "Miracle Drug" for the film's climax. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
