Sólo por un tango
2000 · 14m · España
Directed by Adán Martín, Toni Bestard
Genres: comedy, crime, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
Two small-time kidnappers, Víctor and Chema, decide to kidnap Chema's boss after Chema is fired from his car-sales job, hoping to demand a juicy ransom.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two nobodies botch a kidnapping of a guy who probably deserves it — it's a premise that could be maudlin crime-drama garbage, but instead Martín and Bestard treat it like a perverse comedy of errors, letting the absurdity of small-time criminality do the heavy lifting. This is the kind of film that makes you wonder why more crime comedies don't just *commit* to the stupidity.
The film's formal restraint is what makes it work: it doesn't wink at the audience or lean on slapstick, but rather observes its bumbling criminals with the dry precision of Ealing comedies, situating itself within a lineage of European crime cinema that respects both the genre and the audience's intelligence.
The decision to play it almost straight—minimal score, naturalistic dialogue, no mugging—transforms what could've been a broad caper into something genuinely tense and funny, and you can feel how that tonal discipline lifts a modest Spanish production into something that lands harder than expected.