Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Spanish film noir owes a fair bit to M Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, but it is more European in the way that it exploits the metaphysical side of its obsessions.
It's about " chosen" people who believe "luck" is contagious: it can be passed on. It can also be topped up or drained off.
This is a neat conceit, but here it's portentously and needlessly complicated. It took me ages to sort out what was going on. The setpieces hold the attention in the hope that clarity and meaning will ultimately dawn. (They don't.)
Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is a plane crash survivor who pushes his luck, pulls off a bank heist, then wins a fortune in the Tenerife casino run by the mysterious Sam (Max von Sydow).
He is recruited by Sam's recently cast-off "unlucky" partner (Eusebio Poncela, a Vladimir Putin lookalike) who plans revenge.
Quite how or why he achieves it, the chaotic script never discloses, but it involves people testing their luck by: a) betting on a strange flying insect settling on one of their sugar-coated heads; b) running blindfolded across a rush-hour motorway; c) sprinting ditto through a dense forest without knocking themselves out; and d) confronting Sam and taking turns with him to fire one shot from a revolver containing five bullets in its six chambers.
Ultimately it's ludicrous as well as ludic, and tiresome, too, because the game-playing appears to have no rules except random choice, though the "Spanish roulette" does possess a five-to-one simplicity.
Fresnadillo gives the obfuscation a high-gloss look, but he is lucky to have von Sydow to give it gravitas.
The veteran Swede, 74 today, has spent his career looking for life after Bergman, never quite finding it, yet always transfixing us with his fatalistic charisma - an Ancient Mariner of the cinema.
Intacto
Cert: cert15
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