Brilliance sans Frontiers – The Zero Hour (film review)

This 2010 feature film from Venezuela is an astonishingly good telling of a ‘stock’ storyline: good boy becomes bad, then becomes good, then vacillates, then ….. in the end!

And watching the movie it is impossible not to switch between your expectations of how the many storylines may develop. Secondary characters become major, major characters meet unexpected ends, and all the whole you’re not exactly sure which of the many sides you’re on.

The script is TIGHT! The action zooms along right from the opening sequence, yet this is not in the style of dazzle-with-explosions (and forget the rest). The humour comes from an extraordinary tense and dangerous situation. Spoiler warning: there is lots of death. But nonetheless the script carries each character through their moves with remarkable skill and clarity. In many cases just a few words can speak volumes.

Writer-Director Diego Velasco must surely have a wonderful potential for the future based on this fantastically good movie. And fantastic is what I love from movies, so here’s hoping there’s lots more to come from a new star of the Latin-American melting pot.

Rating: 5 stars

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