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Bad Day to Go Fishing Movie Review

Bad Day to Go Fishing is a 2009 Uruguayan drama film directed by Alvaro Brechner and starring Gary Piquer and Jouko Ahola. It’s a well acted, but narratively sufficient movie.

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“We’re both drunks,

but only one of us will be drinking tonight“

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An over-the-hill wrestler takes on challengers in villages across South America, unaware that his manager rigs the matches. The main strength of this film is that it functions as sort of a travelogue as we get to visit various smaller towns and villages across this continent. Solid cinematography, editing and acting were the highlights here while the directing left a lot to be desired.

Alvaro Brechner failed to imbue this drama with more memorable plot points, cinematic moments and/or elevated themes. This is one of those slow burn movies, meaning that the vast majority of its runtime is devoted to a huge build up where the pacing is glacial and not a lot of momentum is garnered until the final act, which was only fine. These slow burn movies should feature an incredible ending to make it worth the journey and this one simply lacked that.

Bad Day to Go Fishing has no fishing unfortunately. It’s one of those misleading titles. What it does have is a lot of sports, in particular wrestling, and if you are not interesting in this sport, you are bound to find the movie much less interesting than if you were a fan of it.

My main issue here is that the movie’s main theme of deception had a lot of promise, but it wasn’t properly explored, which was frustrating to see. The entire premise was ripe for a strong cinematic piece similar in the vein of dramas and/or comedies coming from countries like Romania. But Brechner failed to make a strong satire of this material, which led to a missed opportunity.

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Bad Day to Go Fishing has solid characterization, but not the best one. The two main characters and their relationship are well painted, but others paled in comparison to those two. The ending is pretty solid, but the rest of the movie failed to garner my interest.