Cartel 2045

In Cartel 2045, there is the introduction that joins the dots from now to the year in the title. For some time there were robot soldiers, but tragedy struck so nations had to ban the use of robot armies which means the technology is going to be used by the criminal world. An interesting setup, but it only serves to explain why law enforcement does not have robot armies while the most powerful cartel in Mexico has a couple in tow.

Characters that one would expect to find in a grindhouse film. Ex-military man gets a chance to set things right by joining “the man” who is trying to counter a super grey threat that is too grey for the government to be involved in. With the help of a black ops team, Carson Wright (Brad Schmidt) takes on the leader of a vicious Mexican cartel, Angel Malvado (Danny Trejo) who is building a super weapon to conquer all of Mexico.

Cartel 2045 fails to balance scenes of conflict and tension with, well, everything else. The effort put into creating the universe is clearly visible, but there is no humor to be found anywhere. Director Chris Le has convinced the entire cast except for Trejo this is the best serious movie they will be a part of. Well, in the end, it’s just a boring mess. While the final ten minutes were decently funny, with heads exploding and some decent CGI gore, Cartel 2045 is still far from entertaining.

In the end, the movie’s execution is done quite poorly. These were really bad decisions either done on purpose, to enhance the grindhouse appeal, or were the remnants of a work in progress screener that I received. The early Spanish only portions put me in such a bind since they were not augmented with subtitles and I had to depend on terrible audio and my limited comprehension of the language. The CGI was virtually nonexistent and the robot’s movements were so poor together with missing visual effects in select scenes. I am unsure whether I should blame this on style or incompetence, but given how badly everything else in the movie was done, I would be more willing to assume it was due to negligence.

Ultimately, it is impossible for me to recommend this to even the grindhouse lovers out there. Short of it being on one of the countless streaming services like Netflix, and you happen to be looking for a movie to watch while binge drinking with mates who enjoy bad movies, there are definitely better things to do out there than to waste an hour and 45 minutes on this.

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