SIN NOMBRE (Cary Fukunaga). 96 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (April 3). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Beautifully photographed but utterly contrived, Cary Fukunaga’s emigration-drama-cum-chase-thriller would surely seem more effective had it arrived before Latin American emigration movies like Babel, Under The Same Moon and Crossing Over. Not that any of those films handled the subject all that well, either.
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Sin Nombre follows a Honduran teen (Paulina Gaitan) as she accompanies the father she barely knows along the illegal migration path from Honduras to the Mexican-American border. Along the way, she meets a Chiapas gang-banger (Edgar Flores) on the run from his former friends.
In its engrossing first movement, as Fukunaga establishes his characters and his plot, Sin Nombre offers a window into a fully realized and unknown world, capturing the alternating rhythms of boredom and tension of the long trip north.
Unfortunately, the writer-director is much better at setting things up than paying them off. Sin Nombre collapses in the second half, hobbled by clumsy, diagrammatic plotting and two key sequences so badly edited that characters literally disappear from the action.
That’s not incoherence, that’s incompetence.
