Ladrón que roba a ladrón (It Takes a Thief to Rob a Thief) 2007 U.S. (100 minutes) directed by Joe Menendez.
A hip Latin duo use a team of amateur immigrants to get even with a smooth, silver-haired ‘infomercial guru’ who has made a fortune selling snake oil to poor Latin American immigrants.
The infomercial guru they target is Moctezuma Valdez (Saúl Lisazo), who is originally from Argentina but changed his named from Claudio Silvestrini for marketing purposes, to take optimum advantage of the Mexican immigrant community (Moctezuma, also Montezuma, a popular Mexican man’s name, was the name of an Aztec emperor).
Emilio (Miguel Varoni), a pony-tailed Columbian former associate of Valdez, and Alejandro (Fernando Colunga), a charming Mexican-American who tells people he is a movie distributor—he sells bootleg movie DVDs from a folding table on the streets of Los Angeles—assemble a team of appealing oddballs, each with his or her own specialty, to get into the vault where Valdez keeps his purportedly ill-gotten gains on the premises of his Hollywood celebrity mansion.
The ‘bad guy’ in this film actually seems to be more the idea of a certain type of overbearing Latin male authority figure, the bullying ‘jefes’ and ‘padrones’ that exploit their own people through boringly predictable but effective intimidation techniques.
One senses a lot of nudging and winking geared toward an immigrant audience that would require a good handle on this particular language and culture fully to appreciate. White Americans turn up in the background as clueless working stiff stereotypes in lower level management or security guards, portrayed presumably as they appear to immigrants —flabby, stupid and non-Spanish speaking.
Still, this is a lively, well-told entertainment with a heart and an appealing cast.
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