Not to pigeonhole an entire subgenre, but international action comedies can often be very strange, but regularly in the best kind of way. Without the restraints that blight many major Hollywood productions, the key creatives are free to tell whatever story they want however they see fit, with Medellin clearly the result of an unfiltered imagination.
After all, how else do you explain the existence of writer, director, and star Franck Gastambide gathering together a multinational ensemble cast – which includes Mike Tyson for some unexplainable reason – to deliver an offbeat caper that finds Ramzy Bedia’s Reda decide to raid the entire nation of Colombia with a crack team after his brother ends up falling foul of the titular cartel?
Taking things one step further, the ragtag group of would-be heroes then kidnap the son of the criminal organization’s leader in an attempt to create some form of leverage, only for anything that could possibly go wrong quickly doing just that. It may not be the best runner and gunner you’ll ever see, but the tongue-in-cheek bravado is enough to ensure it might be worth checking out for die-hard fans of the genre.
Plenty of Prime Video subscribers have fallen into that exact boat, too, after FlixPatrol revealed Medellin to be one of the top-viewed titles on the streaming service’s worldwide watch-list this weekend. If you aren’t even the least bit curious about a South American-set shoot ’em up that involves Mike Tyson taking out drug traffickers, then you most definitely are not among the intended target audience for this one.
