The sultry atmosphere of La Guajira, a desert region most notably captured in Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s “Birds of Passage,” permeates “Pimpinero: Blood and Oil,” an uneven but often narratively unpredictable Colombian crime saga. The drama unfolds within the violent, turf-warring world of “pimpineros,” gasoline smugglers crossing the border made of arid terrain between Colombia and Venezuela (where gas is cheap given the country’s oil reserves) in beat-up vehicles. The Indigenous community at the center of “Birds,” the Wayuu, also has a smaller but still dramatically relevant presence in this latest outing by Andrés Baiz, the director of the Netflix miniseries on female cartel leader Griselda Blanco.
Rising Mexican star Alejandro Speitzer—famous as a young kid for starring in Mexican soap operas for children—plays Juan, the testosterone-fueled, fearless youngest brother in the Estrada clan, a respected trio with a reputation for their driving and business practices. Speitzer, doing a Colombian accent, has a magnetic presence and piercing gaze required for a leading man; he uses pertinent danger but still holds on to a righteous moral compass. We meet them as the eldest sibling, Moises (an underused but convincingly taciturn Juanes, a Colombian music star in a rare acting role), surrenders to Carmelo (David Noreña), a stereotypical kingpin monopolizing the gas trafficking as well as other illicit enterprises.
In between them in age is Ulises (Alberto Guerra), a drunken coward troubled by his mounting debt with another local, unscrupulous malefactor and a fear-stricken inability to stand up for himself or his loved ones. But the brothers’ relationship never surfaces as of particular interest to the co-writer-director. It’s a shame because the three characters appear charged with repressed emotion. The conflicts and intimacies that unite and separate them remain at a distance with few details or meaningful interactions to flesh out their three-way dynamic. What granted Juan such a strong sense of justice and loyalty, and conversely, what rendered Ulises so susceptible to the vices that rule his life? Who knows, as a portrait of complicated brotherhood, “Pimpinero” is not.
Halfway through, Baiz and his co-writer Maria Camila Arias shift the focus to Juan’s girlfriend Diana (Laura Osma). Initially in the periphery, Diana slowly inches her way into becoming a pimpinera herself—like her father—but only momentarily. In the aftermath of a tragedy, she embarks on a rageful quest for answers. The writers subvert expectations by not giving into the “last job and then we quit” trope that Juan plants early on and never entertaining the more simplistic resolution of lovers eloping. Instead, Osma takes the reigns as a determined protagonist unwilling to accept the explanations of her ruthless enemies. While the actress navigates her ascent into the lead role with a fierce demeanor that galvanizes, the realization that this is Diana’s movie and that all that came before only served as set-up sours the entire ordeal. This bait-and-switch approach shortchanges Juan’s and Diana’s segments, as neither can flourish fully.
Sweeping vistas envelop the screen as dust clouds awaken behind the pimpineros’ fast cars in the hands of cinematographer Mateo Londono, who brings a grounded sumptuous to the visual relation between the people and the land. The setting itself, inhospitable and saturated in color, already defies strict realism, and when accentuated by Londono’s eye for framing figures against the open skies drenched in the stark light of the desert sun. The image of Juan defiantly kneeling in front of the police as his car bursts into flames behind him, an act of self-determination, might seem run-of-the-mill when described, but in relation to “Pimpineros,” it carries a scorching potency. And yet, despite these highlights, all of the ever-present tropes familiar to stories set in these underworlds cross the screen without fault: shootouts, car chases, betrayal, prostitution, death. Baiz, who also directed a dozen episodes of the show “Narcos” and several of the Spanish-language remake of “Breaking Bad” (“Metástasis”), is more than fluent in these realms of the unlawful but struggles to craft characters and situations layered beyond superficial motivations.
With lots of ground to cover from the initial conflict to the revenge plot that the film becomes in its second half, what’s undermined are the moments that merit closer attention. A scene where Juan and Diana cuddle, or another where the latter and her mother discuss the death of the young woman’s father, feel emotionally stunted; the filmmakers cut away from them too abruptly, rather than letting the audience sit with the romance and pain of those exchanges. That’s one aspect of several in which “Pimpinero” grazes the chance of becoming a great film but repeatedly lets it slip from its grasp, settling for being just slightly above average.
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