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Don't Tempt Me

2003, Movie, R, 108 mins

Don't Tempt Me: Review

DON'T TEMPT ME | SIN NOTICIAS DE DIOS
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Either something has been lost in translation, or 2001 was a particularly weak year for Spanish movies. How else to explain the fact that this tiresome comedy about the struggle over one sinner's soul nabbed 11 Goya Award nominations? The settings are Heaven, Hell and points in between. Heaven looks exactly like Paris, or rather a dreamy, black-and-white vision of Paris as imagined by Lola Nevado (Victoria Abril), an angel who lives blissfully within her fondest fantasy: She's the popular chanteuse at a swank pre-WWII nightclub. But the overhead in Heaven is high, and with so few souls deserving to pass through the pearly gates, Paradise is in danger of shutting down altogether and conceding defeat to the rebel angels of Hell, whose business is booming. So when the mother of Manny (Demian Bichir), a suicidal boxer who's just a few left hooks away from a permanent K.O., sends prayers for her son's salvation Heavenward, her call is taken very seriously. Heaven's operations manager, Marina D'Angelo (Fanny Ardant), sends Lola to Earth where, in the person of Manny's estranged wife, she'll hopefully save his soul. Meanwhile in Hell, an infernal bureaucrat (Gemma Jones) who's conspiring to overthrow the underworld's own CEO (Gael Garcia Bernal), gets wind of the scheme. To foil the plot, she dispatches an agent of her own, Carmen Ramos (Penelope Cruz), a former gangster whose been slinging hash in the mess hall down on circle 22. Her mission: Steal Manny's soul before those do-gooders upstairs turn this sinner into a saint. Carmen shows up at Manny's apartment in Madrid and convinces him that she's a cousin he hasn't seen in years. Lola, however, knows exactly what's up, but with nothing less than Heaven at stake, she's not going down without a fight. It might sound like fun, but it's not. The film lumbers along with a confused logic and becomes so entangled in its own numerous subplots that it trips over its own leaden feet. Manny barely emerges as a character, and whenever the question of why this unlikable thug should matter one way or the other, someone invariably invokes Pascal's maxim about Cleopatra's nose — if it had been but a inch shorter, the whole face of history would be different — and leaves it at that. Whatever. It's hard to care even just a little when you have no idea what's at stake or why, be it Heaven or Hell. (In English and Spanish with English subtitles.) leave a comment --Ken Fox
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