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Ratas, ratones, rateros Movie Review

Ratas, ratones, rateros is a 1999 Ecuadorian crime film directed by Sebastian Cordero and starring Simon Brauer. It is a deeply flawed, though well made crime movie.

The world of Salvador, a young and naïve petty thief is changed by the arrival of his cousin Angel, an ex-convict in search of easy money, and with a hideout. Salvador gets wrapped up in Angel’s twisted dealings in an attempt to escape from his suffocating family, dragging along his family and friends, in his criminal path. That is the premise behind this crime film that takes another look into the crime-ridden streets of Latin America.

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Needless to say, we’ve seen many movies from this region of the world that deal with this particular issue and most of them did it much better. Sebastian Cordero is a competent director who would in 2013 go on to direct the underrated SF gem ‘Europa Report’. Here however, his directing was only okay as he failed to imbue the story with more memorable scenarios and characters.

The acting performances are uniformly very good and some of them are actually quite believable and fun as the film’s more lively personalities, but not a lot of development was given to any of the characters, which was a huge problem for a story that was begging for character-driven narratives.

Ratas, ratones, rateros has pretty good cinematography, score, sound and production design. It’s a technically well made and polished movie that still suffered from some terrible pacing issues. The movie is overlong, badly paced and not particularly involving throughout its runtime. It needed more momentum and many more memorable plot points.

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The first half is way too slow and too often I wondered why certain scenes weren’t shortened as this simple story did not need to be over one and a half hours long. The ending was also disappointing, though overall the second half was much better and more engaging than the slow and dragging first one.