TIFF 2021: La Soga 2
TIFF 2021La Soga 2 appears to be a passion project for writer, director, and star, Manny Perez. Every scene and every character moment in La Soga 2 is treated with the utmost intensity. At the end of the day, this may be the highest compliment that one can pay to this follow-up to the 2009 original. La Soga 2 drops the audience into the world of the criminal underbelly of Pawtucket, Rhode Island – yeah, you read that correctly. However, the limited production resources are evident, and very little helps elevate these street thugs into street kings. Neither is there a key element able to elevate the script or Manny Perez’s direction to feel like something other than a cheap, formulaic production, except perhaps for his passion to tell this story.
Manny Perez’s protagonist, Luisito, is a former assassin who’s moved on from his former life – even though he has a pet rooster, which is an apparent nod to Dominican culture. Like the docile pet rooster, Luisito has also been tamed because, by all accounts, he’s now a pretty good fella living the life of a decent Pawtucket citizen. He’s got a lovely girlfriend, Lia (Sarah Jorge León), who’s OK with his past – no small relationship feat. However, all that catches up with him when Lia is kidnapped, and Luisito is called on to do one more job – a job involving gangsters, a dirty senator, and a list of sensitive information on a memory stick.
There is nothing interesting or even flavourful in this particular set up. These are boring, standard crime-action, street-level gangster tropes. However, a mysterious and beautiful independent assassin shows up with her own agenda and provides at least a little bit of spice. Not only is this second assassin (Hada Vanessa) a gorgeous, charismatic ass-kicking killer who counters the desperate, weak victimhood of Luisito’s kidnapped girlfriend, but her involvement balls up the original villain’s initiatives. It’s not cutting edge material by any means, but it’s a mildly satisfying variant to the painfully ordinary and clichéd stuff that is revolving around Luisito. Hada Vanessa is the only actor on board to give anything worth watching, and if La Soga 2’s legacy was to launch her career, all would not be lost. She looks great, has screen presence, and carries an appropriate tough bluster into scenes whether they are close-ups behind a sniper scope or calling the shots as the leader of her own smug little gang.
La Soga 2 is meant to draw John Wick comparisons. A fabled assassin who’d gotten out of the world of crime who is dragged back in. It doesn’t work here. Despite Perez’s furled brow, earnest intensity, and occasional yelling, La Soga 2 is always ever shallow character-writing. Where the character of John Wick has swagger, weaponry experience, and a certain amount of combat savvy right in his DNA, Luisito is tired looking, slow-moving, and seems only to have a rudimentary familiarity with drawing a pistol out of the belt of his trousers. The aesthetic that La Soga 2 goes for does not not work. Perez may simply emulate some basic TV-shootout scenarios for his gunplay and shootout choreography here, but he does once in a while fill rooms with Tony Scott and 1980s music-video smoke to allow some shots to linger on rays of light hanging on the ambience of the room.
Manny Perez’s directorial debut is a decent, at best, effort. He wrote, produced, and starred in the twelve-year-old original as well. The world of these characters is a mere off-ramp away from Perez’s own life experiences and acquaintances. The entire La Soga experience is a passion for him, as he clearly wants to bring his Dominican American culture to the screen. The personal ‘past v. present’ attitude in the script may be admirable, but the lack of experience behind the camera and lack of vision for the film leave this as a lightweight, clichéd experience.