The Zero Hour (2010)
The Zero Hour tells the story of the La Parca (Zapata 666), a fearsome assassin who is forced to kidnap a private clinic to save the love of his life, Ladydi (Amanda Key). They soonreached the police and a media circus with them, who make our character into a national hero.La Parca finds that saving the life of Ladydi be difficult, but escaped with his followers will be an almost impossible task. Time starts to run out, and what seemed like a perfect plan will end in a frantic ending where La Parca is forced to confront past mistakes, and discover that their worst enemies are closer than he imagined.
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Don't listen to the negative reviews
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.
The story takes place during a medical strike when doctors hesitated to look at the patients. This film tells the story of a Hit-man, La Parca who is forced to create a hostage situation in a hospital to save his girlfriend. This film reminds me of Denzel's John Q and Hostage situation looks like Dog Day Afternoon. Violence is common in Caracas and during the filming, three crew members were kidnapped. Diego, the director of the film was held up at gun point and a supporting actor was assassinated. Anyway, all this issue helps the movie in a positive way and it breaks all previous Venezuelan box office records. Overall, it's a watchable movie and only recommended to those who can handle violence scenes.
This movie really impressed me. I'm not a fan of violent or "action" movies, and usually, Venezuelan films that deal with violence do it with little subtlety and depth. This is quite an exception. The movie is, over all, credible. The script is full of humour (albeit a very dark one) and, most of the time, quite precise, without excesses, and full of twists and turns. The actors demonstrate something everybody knows: there is a lot of talent in Venezuela, but it is seldom that directors find a way to show it as well as Velasco did. Even though some of the limitations imposed by what one might call the political situation of our country are more or less noticeable, this film finds a way to portrait our reality without romanticism or lies. Aesthetically, the film reaches levels I have seen rarely in our nation's production. It's worth the watch.
I think that this is the best movie created in my country. I've seen it 2 times now and I still can't believe that we were able to make an action movie. I only have one critic and is that in the scene where they start shooting from the roof, the wound in La Parca's arm suddenly disappeared until the end of it. I think that it is an important detail that they had to check in the edition. Apart from that, I give it a 10 because I'm proud of all the people involved in that story that made possible to talk throughout a movie about our everyday problems even if the main subject of it is still the "bad side" (crooks, shootings, death, hovels, poverty, etc).
One thing that annoys me off about Venezuelan cinema is that it invariably falls into either the historical drama or the crime thriller, and too often it fails in both accounts. HERMANO was one exception, and now LA HORA CERO is the other, perhaps the first incursion of my country's cinema into action thriller.While the occasional clichés are present, this is a well-written adventure full of twists that make sense all the way, and genuinely exciting action sets that was a pleasant surprise to see. The main character is played by an underground hip hop artist who had never acted in his life, but he never ceases to bring the truth, not even next to people who have been acting for at least 12 years. I truly hope you one day get the chance to see this.