A Slice o' Hell

Hell is in similarly dire financial straits, thanks in large part to a rebellion forming amongst higher-ups who want to oust manager Jack Davenport (Gael García Bernal, of Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También) -- an uprising that includes, among other things, a demand for the installation of air-conditioning in management's offices. Hell, as revealed by writer-director Agustín Díaz Yanes (1995's Nobody Will Speak of Us When We're Dead), is far less inviting than its upstairs counterpart: It's an intemperate wasteland on the outside (it looks a bit like Arizona) and a prison cafeteria on the inside, where Carmen takes orders and endures the taunts and attempted sexual assaults of its patrons. The cruelest joke of all is that, in Hell, only English is spoken.

Had Yanes made a film about the long-running feud between Heaven and Hell, presented as two crooked corporations paying the price for years of fraud -- and the absence of CEO God, who doesn't take meetings or seem concerned with book-keeping shenanigans -- he might have had something substantive and wry. He's good with the small, nasty joke, such as when the former head of the International Monetary Fund takes over Hell's finances, or when Carmen's shocked to learn that Lola, a former politician, was allowed into Heaven despite her former profession. The writer-director's trying to say something about the corruption of culture -- we've become, says one character, a Disneyland populated by people who feel no guilt for anything and are therefore hellbound from the get-go -- but winds up getting lost in the Lola-Carmen-Manny Bermuda triangle.

The biggest problem is that Manny's a thoroughly unlikable and wholly unredeemable character -- a boxer who likes to hit his women and expects them to either stand in the kitchen or lie in the bedroom, as well as a thug who's swindled from corrupt cops who now expect him to pay up or else. We're never sure why his is a soul worth saving or why it's so highly prized by the two fallen angels who've moved in with him. (Curiously, he recognizes Lola as his wife and Carmen as his long-lost cousin, and we're never sure how this is possible since they've only just been assigned to the case.)