RUDO Y CURSI (Carlos Cuarón). 103 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (May 22). For venues and times, see movies. Rating: N
In Carlos Cuarón’s Rudo Y Cursi, sibling rivalry on the football pitch leads to misery – for the audience, anyway.
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Cuarón, best known as the co-writer of brother Alfonso’s excellent Y Tu Mamá También, reunites that film’s stars, Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, as half-brothers who leave their impoverished village to vie for glory on rival Mexico City soccer teams.
For a few minutes, seeing Luna and Bernal back together is enough to put a smile on your face – especially with Bernal playing a grinning dolt and Luna a surly prick with a gambling addiction.
But it soon becomes clear that writer-director Cuarón is just shuffling through every sports-movie cliché in the book – locker-room hazings! the temptations of hard drugs! raging egos and gold-digging, gorgeous girlfriends! climactic pressure to fix a championship game! – without understanding how any of those clichés might be used to propel his story.
Giving us some sense of his protagonists’ athletic skills would have been a start.
