Matando Cabos (Park City at Midnight) Directed by: Alejandro Lozano

Matando Cabos (Park City at Midnight)

A Spanish film with American screwball comedy sensibilities, “Matando Cabos” was certainly one of the better movies of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. While definitely not one of those “life changing experiences,” such as other competition films like “On A Clear Day,” this film is, as some festival-goers put it, “what ‘Snatch’ should have been.” Also similar to Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” in its matter-of-fact bluntness and unabashed violence for post-modern comedic effect, “Mantado Cabos” is smart, exercising parallel editing to tell multiple stories at once in order to intricately weave them together to achieve a specific goal, utilizes the rules of an interesting screenplay structure to its fullest, and serves its purpose as an all-around fun film to watch.

“Matando Cabos” is a difficult film to explain, as there’s so much happening at the same time that the plot becomes rather convoluted and complex–but in a good way. It centers around the exploits of two friends who work together, one of which is dating the daughter of their boss, the millionaire monster, Mantando Cabos. When Cabos catches his future son-in-law copulating with his daughter (something most fathers are hesitant to see), he attempts to fire the guy, but trips on a golf ball and knocks himself out. In an attempt to hide what looks like a murder attempt, the two friends and a former wrestler known as “Mascarita” and his miniature sidekick, “the Cannibal,” decide to dump the unconscious body, doused in alcohol, on the lawn of Cabos’s house, where his wife is throwing a party that evening (to make Cabos believe he was drunk and merely passed out). Nacho, the childhood friend of Cabos who went on to be a janitor with a deeply-harbored resentment of Cabos (and for good reason), beats them to the punch by stealing Cabos’s clothes and kidnapping him.

Things only get more complicated when Nacho’s son, a Spanish Keanu Reeves type, in an attempt to avenge the wrongs done to his father by kidnapping Cabos for a ransom, accidentally (and unknowingly) kidnaps his own father, mistaking him for Cabos in his clothes. Escalating from one situation to the next, “Matando Cabos” never lets go of its audience, and pulls them along for a wild ride that never lets itself up, and remains, while predictable, a fun predictable to the very end.

One of the prime elements that makes “Matando Cabos” work so well is its use of a technique filmmakers use called “parallel editing.” The technique allows for audiences to keep track of multiple events happening simultaneously by having the film switch between scenes that are supposed to be happening at the same time. For example, there is a point in the film where the two young protagonists are putting the body of Cabos into their trunk, and this is intercut with a small scene of the two actual kidnappers driving away. Later when the two young men are trying to escape the party thrown by Cabos’s wife, the scenes are interjected with scenes of a distraught kidnapping ring as they soon begin to discover that they have kidnapped the wrong man. Because there are so many elements within “Matando Cabos,” it is the technique of parallel editing which allows audiences to keep track of all the events, rather that just leaving viewers in the dark to figure out for themselves what the movie is about and why it is so comical.

Another element in “Matando Cabos” that makes it so successful is an obvious understanding of screenplay structure on the part of its screenwriters, Tony Dalton, Krysztof Raczynski, and Alejandro Lozano. There is an old adage for screenwriting that says, “Chase your characters up a tree, and then throw rocks at them”–meaning, simply, to do the most horrible things to your characters and see if they can get out of a worst-case situation. Nothing could be more true of “Matando Cabos,” which even begins with a horrible situation (the “tree”)–a boy dating the boss’s daughter ends up actually kidnapping him. How could that possibly be any worse, without the police finding out and taking him on a police chase across the country? Defying that sort of cliche expectation, the writers expertly throw in entirely random, new characters each with their own motivations and goals, and the clash between these conflicting goals ensues in so much chaos and confusion that the script works extremely well in terms of keep an audience’s attention and keeping the film interesting.

Finally, one last thing about “Matando Cabos” is that it’s not trying to pretend to be something that it’s not. One conception about the Sundance Film Festival is that its entry selections are typically “life changing” or weird. While “Matando Cabos” is a bit weird, to say the least, it’s obvious from the get-go that this film’s intention was never to make its audiences necessarily think about how they live their lives, or the world that they live in. It serves its purpose as primarily escapist entertainment, and for whatever real “meaning” it holds for the writers and director of the film, “Matando Cabos” is at least just a clever, well-plotted film full of building comedic elements that prevent someone from leaving the theater without a split side.

To say that “Matando Cabos” was your typical, “life-changing” film typical of Sundance would be a gross mistake. It is, however, a very successful film that was accepted to the Festival on pure merit for its wonderfully smart storyline, its complexity facilitated by the use of parallel editing, the obvious understanding of screenplay structure by the film’s writers, and it easily achieves the level of “entertaining,” surely to grip audience members to their seats until the very end.