ScoobyWell
Great visuals, story delivers no surprises
Catangro
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Billy Ollie
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
paul2001sw-1
Thise of us who favour the establishment of a more equal society argue that it would even benefit the rich themselves - what's the point of having money if you have to live in fear of someone taking it off you? And the idea of a film set in a secure community might seem to be a good way of exploring the corrosive effect on personal morality that comes from living on either side of a state of siege. In 'La Zona', we see residents of a posh enclave in Mexico, slum kids and a corrupt police force: at times, the movie seems to be suggesting they're all as bad as each other. After a botched robbery sees an intruder stuck in the zone, the residents resolve to track him down: unfortunately, the plot doesn't make perfect sense. In particular, the motivation of the residents, to risk their own lives for a notion of revenge, never seems wholly logical; it's hard to believe that such influential people would not have appropriate police protection, if they didn't antagonise the cops by insisting on doing it themselves. The ending is thus less powerful than it tries to be; what's really chilling is the way that legal systems often seem to care only about property rights. Some of the worst behaviour on this planet is carried out by those who never need to break a law.
f-amigoni1
Every year there's a summer movie festival in the open court of an old palace in my town. I like going there, with some friends of mine or alone, to see films carefully chosen every time from the recent months new releases. The logic is: no blockbusters, high quality. I knew nothing about "La Zona". From the first minute, i was given the possibility to see the future directly in the eyes of Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, if they were here now. The birth of a brave new world, full of violence, where law is a word without meaning. Or with a lot of different meanings, that's the same. The plot is very simple,but brilliant. A perfect mechanism, with classical roles and fantastic acting. Destiny is in the air, like in Greek tragedy, and the best of all is that you can't identify yourself with one or the other easily. If you do that, you'll be someway guilty. Not to miss.
rasecz
In any large city of Latin America or the rest of the third world, wealth and poverty coexist side by side, not uncommonly separated by just a thin high wall. In typical fashion the rich appropriate the bulk of the country's wealth, a few of the poor reclaim a tiny portion back through robbery and muggings, and the rich react in turn by protecting themselves and even striking back. It's low intensity class warfare.La Zona is an enclave, a walled-city with massive iron gates, widely scattered security cameras and around-the-clock monitoring. It's the modern equivalent of the medieval castle. Laying siege is a slum, where live the nemeses of the inhabitants of La Zona. They have come to this enclave out of fear, for protection against further assaults, to enjoy the good life in a secure haven. Many are angry. Some have been victims. Some are vengeful.The story begins when, during a storm, the wall is breached and electrical power is lost. A threesome from the slum takes advantage to penetrate the enclave and steal a few things. The temporary invasion does not go well. Shots are exchanged. People die. That event sets the wheels of the thriller in motion.The typical characters are present. The honest police investigator whose work is subverted by a corrupt police department. The good bad-guy, the bad bad-guy, the good good-guy and the bad good-guy. They are all there, some in multiple copies. It's formulaic, but effective.
corrosion-2
La Zona is one of those rare films which grips you from the start and doesn't let go till the end credits roll up. It is also a rare example of a thriller and social drama which delivers on both fronts.La Zona are residential compounds in Mexico for the rich and the affluent. They have their own security system and guards and even law, thus separating them from the normal law of the land. These "zones" are real and do exist in Mexico city. The one depicted in the film is separated from the slum neighbourhood by large concrete walls and barbed wire. An accident causes one of the power pylons next to the Zone to collapse thus paving an entry for three young petty thieves from the slums to enter the Zone to make a quick burglary. Things go wrong, however, and two of the boys are shot dead while the third manages to escape from the burgled house but not from the zone.We then follow the search for the boy, by the residents (who intend to kill him) and the cops, who are mostly corrupt ready to turn a blind eye for the right sum. The Zone is a superbly tense thriller and a damning indictment of the social system in Mexico. The residents in these zones appear to be totally cut off from the reality outside; a nice contrast is a golf course inside the Zone from which the players get a panoramic view of the slums.It is hard to believe that this is the feature debut of its director Rodrigo Pla. It's one of the most accomplished feature debuts that I have ever seen and you can be certain that Rodrigo Pla's name is going to be much better known in the coming years.
