Sin Nombre is a fictionalized account of the largely unknown (to Americans, at least) struggle that would-be immigrants go through long before they even get to the U.S. border. The story of a young man on the run from a murderous gang is told through those hardships. Assuming this is a realistic portrayal of life for residents of South and Central America, what these people go through is terrifying and dangerous. Anyone who would willingly face this is a person of character, or at least awfully tough.
But just because the characters are sympathetic doesn’t mean they’re in a good movie.
Sin Nombre is at once an illuminating portrayal of anonymous people (hence the title: in English, Nameless) and a thriller marred by long stretches of un-illuminating inactivity, poutiness by the lead character as a substitute for acting, and a spectacularly clichéd climax. The fact that the picture is in a language other than English elicits in some American critics the same reaction that British accents bring out in American audiences: This doesn’t sound like what I hear every day, so it must be important.
It’s not that it’s a terrible movie. It’s not at all–it’s pretty good in fact, for what it is. But there are better thrillers out there with superior dialogue and deeper characters that never get the kind of acclaim that Sin Nombre enjoys. I believe it is being praised more for the sympathetic and PC nature of its characters and story than for the artistic or entertainment value of the picture itself.
Sin Nombre may be a filmmakers’ attempt to influence the immigration debate in the U.S., but that’s not apparent from the movie, which is a straightforward story about people in dire straits. That their situation is an element in a larger political debate is never mentioned. This lack of a direct appeal makes it a more effective plea for sympathy for illegal immigrants, and perhaps that was the filmmakers’ intent.
But again, the implications of the story are just that, assumptions that viewers may make (which is a whole lot of the reason people make and see movies in the first place). Moreover, the problems that the would-be immigrants face are almost entirely the doing of South and Central Americans governments, not Washington, DC. Compared to the other obstacles the characters face in getting to America, getting across the U.S. border is quite literally a trivial matter.
There is quality filmmaking here, at times top-shelf, but even top-shelf is still off-the-shelf. Sin Nombre is as well-directed as anything else in the sub-genre of the real-world thriller, but that’s a mighty narrow niche, and the occasionally inspired visual or intense moment does not make up for the pedestrian feel of the rest of it–pedestrian in the sense that we’ve felt this kind of tension in a movie many times before, and we know reflexively where it’s going.
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