Gringo review – muddled drugs thriller

This woolly-headed thriller is so casually incoherent, so erratically paced and unfocused that you rather suspect that medical marijuana featured as heavily in the writing process as it does in the plot. The always likable David Oyelowo is Harold, hapless employee of a drugs company run by Charlize Theron (a cross between a Disney evil queen and a dominatrix) and Joel Edgerton (ruthless, stupid, priapic: the kind of man who either ends up in prison or in charge of a country). During a business trip to Mexico, Harold learns that he is about to lose both his job and his wife and so stages a fake kidnapping. Meanwhile, Harry Treadaway and Amanda Seyfried are adrift in a subplot that goes missing for large chunks of the film. In a particularly crass twist, in this film full of crooks, cartels and mariachi musicians, the only trustworthy Mexican turns out to be American.