Living a life of monotony, heartache and family pressure drives Maria to walk on the wrong side of the law. She no longer wishes to exert her energies towards working for low life bosses who pay pittance in wages, and treat their employees like dirt. Faced with a grim future, and an unwanted pregnancy, Maria is offered a way out: carry 62 pellets of cocaine in her stomach and deliver them to New York, without getting caught.
The contrast between Colombia and America, New York are obvious; beautiful idyllic landscapes or harsh, multi-storey concrete buildings. Underneath all that, however, is a world that operates away from the eyes of the law. Using people desperate for money to work as mules, drugs are transported by the very people who need the money. Their life is literally in their hands.
I liked many things about Maria Full of Grace, but it seems to lose its strength when the filming moved to New York. It may have been financial or time constraints, but the latter part of the film seems incredibly rushed. Shots are cut much faster, even when there isn’t much going on. Even the characters feel a lot more shallow than where they’re in Colombia. They’re much more likable prior to their travel, as well as feeling more real as people; the change in character (required due to an incident) is unrealistic and wholly unintelligible. The empathy is gone and stereotypes and predictability becomes the norm.
Admittedly, I think anyone who watches this film can guess the outcome and the morale of the tale. However, rather than hitting on the morality of maria and her friends are involved in, it waivers it by trying to focus on the aftermath of when things go wrong. This would be fine, it if wasn’t for the fact that everything felt like a TV soap opera. Movement and facial expressions become exaggerated and unconvincing, and the script itself starts to feel desperate and completely unreal.
Compared to the enjoyably paced beginning where we see Maria’s life in disarray and disharmony, we see no real development except what we see in films of this nature everytime. There’s no new message, and it’s not really delivered with any power or feeling. I did enjoy the irony of her life working as a metaphorical mule by giving her paycheck to her ungrateful family (who love her, but fail to see the error of their behaviour), and yet she falls into a much more dangerous company, and still ending up short.
There’s definitely something lacking about Maria Full of Grace, but I can’t quite place my finger on it. There are several moments where it does become gripping, but these moments pass and soon you’re left watching something that has pedestrian character development at a rapid pace. It’s not the experience of the acting that I call into question, but the direction and script writing which seems to suggest that what started off as a small idea has been milked and stretched; when out of ideas they’ve pinched every cliche in the book to create the second half of the film.
It all soon becomes a bit boring and tiring to watch yet another predictable film about drugs, and we’re meant to care more because Maria is pregnant and involved in drugs with some very bad people. I also hated the stereotype of the fat good for nothing in Blanca; how many times have we seen a film which has a thin person for a lead, but a typecast larger character who’s a little stupid or perhaps easily intimidated. It’s quite pathetic, and it soon becomes another nail in the coffin for a film that starts off promisingly.
The final conclusion is as predictable as the rest of the film, and was so expected that by the time the film ends, you don’t particularly care about the characters or the film – all you want is the time you spent watching this film; a film with a solid, but deceptive opening that starts to ride downhill without any brakes, and without a decent script or sustainable and consistent direction.
Verdict: Promising start, but soon becomes tiresome and boring – let alone predictable. If you have nothing else to watch, then possibly worth a rent