Unit 7 Review
By David Kempler
Does Not Play Like a Unit
Violent cops and robbers films are a staple of the industry. Chinese cinema is churning them out at assembly-line speed. "Unit 7" is a Spanish entry that tries very hard - a little bit too hard - to demonstrate gritty good-guy/bad-guy wars. The twist here is that there are no real good guys. The cops are no better than the drug dealers they are trying to wipe out.
Alberto Rodriguez's "Unit 7" is about four cops whose mission it is to eradicate the most dangerous drug trafficking network in Seville during the 1992 Seville World Exhibition.
One of the cops is Angel (Mario Casas), the group's leader. He is a young stud who is striving to make detective. He looks more like a male model for underwear ads than a cop to me. Another cop, Rafael (Antonio de la Torre) is more the hard-boiled type who has been around forever and has been beating on perps as a matter of sport, never betraying much in the way of personality.
There are two main plot lines. One concerns the battle between the cops and drug dealers. The second consists of the constant tension between the two cops. Neither one works particularly well, because Rodriguez is too focused on trying to create a gangster epic, and there just isn't one anywhere in here.
While I love a good violent gangster tale, this one wore me down to the point where I didn't care who won the drug wars or the internal police wars. There are the usual scenes of corruption, especially among the higher-ups, but they serve more to point out the inadequacies than to highlight the tensions that should be inherent in this type of story. Everyone tries hard, and it's not a total zero, but the ambition far surpasses the result.
