Dog Eat Dog

As the first feature-length Columbian film to ever be invited to Sundance, Carlos Moreno's crime flick Dog Eat Dog is the sort of middling pap one might expect from such an over-hyped festival. Another in a long line of what critics like to call "post-Tarantino" cinema — you know, the type of movie that mixes brutal violence, a cheeky pop score and, for good measure, some sort of magical realist flourish (in this case, black magic) — Dog Eat Dog is vacantly stylistic and (worse) insufferably dull. When Victor (Marlon Moreno Solarte), a grumpy goon who lifts the money he was contracted to collect for Columbian kingpin El Orejón (Blas Jaramillo), he sets off a chain of events that retreads the cause-and-effect crime movie footprints of everything from Charley Varrick to No Country For Old Men. Holed up in a hotel room with Eusebio ("scar Borda), another hired gun with some bad voodoo hanging over him, the two spend the bulk of the movie ripping off and killing whoever just to stay alive. Moreno is likely driving at the cruel every-man-for-himself ethics of organized crime, and he does so painting with nothing but the broadest strokes (see: the film's title). Shot in a dusty, oversaturated colour palette that self-consciously recalls the cinematography of a film like City of God, Moreno tries too hard to make his film seem gritty. While Dog Eat Dog wants to pistol-whip you across the face, screaming "This is real!," any semblance of street-savvy authenticity is undone by its ironic soundtrack, unfeeling violence and plain stupid hocus-pocus subplot. Boring, derivative and gimmicky (El Orejón is agoraphobic, presumably just so Moreno can deck out his penthouse HQ with a bunch of cool looking telescopes), Dog Eat Dog is of little interest to anyone who caught Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah and has had the half-witted "crime is savage, see?" moral crammed down their throat these past couple months.