McConaugheMay Day 26: Scorpion Spring

Here's a strange little surprise in the last week of my arduous journey: A little crime caper without too many ambitions, anchored by some solid performances from Alfred Molina and an extremely hunky Esai Morales, that makes the frankly pretty daring move to have fairly important dialogue scenes entirely in untranslated Spanish. Don't think I've ever seen a (relatively) mainstream movie make that choice, but I liked it. I let my daily Spanish practice lapse late last year around the same time I let my daily running habit lapse, probably for the same reason (depression), so I was rusty. That said, I still got what I needed to from those scenes and it was satisfying to not even have the option to use subtitles to help me along.

The lead (?) white guy (played by an actor I’d never heard of named Patrick McGaw) is superfluous both to the plot and the weakest part of the film, but the filmmakers seem to know that since he doesn't even get a real arc. Mostly he exists to be a sounding board for Alfred Molina hamming it up as a pervy French actor or Morales looking hunkily at him. I can’t find any proof online, but I would guess that he was added to the existing script as a compromise to get it made since it was the '90s and you needed a milquetoast white dude in a crime movie just to be there.

This is not a film I can imagine being fondly remembered by most people; it’s exactly the type of mid-budget crime thriller that one might see while flipping through the channels on a sleepy Sunday and being intrigued enough by Alfred Molina and the vast desert expanses that you end up watching the whole thing. We used to make more movies like this, disposable works of art, existing more for an audience to passively consume and like well enough before moving on to the next thing. This has largely been replaced by YouTube videos of escalators and video game records. One could decry this as a tragedy, but I prefer to simply accept the passage of time.

Matthew McConaughey appears as the main villain at the very end of the film and speaks Spanish, which really surprised me. I’d never heard him speak in another language before, and hadn’t really ever considered that he could or would. As I learned from Greenlights, he never bothered to practice, either his lines or the language, so had to improvise on the spot and deliver the lines phonetically on short notice. I suppose it’s a credit to his natural talent that I couldn’t immediately tell. There is still more to learn, still deeper depths to plumb. I'm not coming up for air until I find that black pearl lost at sea no matter how unlucky it might be. There is something to be gained here. There is a value in what I'm doing, even if I can't see it.