The Good Boy Movie Review

The Good Boy, a journey into Madrid's lower-class barrios, introduces us to a young boxer named Angel (Álex González), whose optimism battles with his realism, and that fight ends up as a draw. A Rocky wannabe, Alex comes to realize that his route out of the neighborhood will not be through a boxing ring, and he decides to take a very different path.

The kid's got problems. His hand is injured, he's being asked to throw fights, he works three part-time jobs, and his poor widowed mother is about to evicted from her flat and has no money to go anywhere else. At the same time, his vivacious girlfriend Alicia (Eva Marciel) is starting to hunger for the finer things in life.

Given all this grief, Angel is susceptible to bad suggestions when a mysterious man named Vidal (Darío Grandinetti), who claims to be an ex-boxer friend of his father's, shows up, gives Angel a taste of the good life, and matter-of-factly tells him he can afford his nice home and lovely girlfriend because he's a bank robber. For real. Not only that, but he could use some backup on his next couple of jobs, and Angel fits the bill.

Angels and devils duke it out on Angel's shoulders for a while, but Alicia urges him on, and sure enough, their first heist is quick and painless. Pleased with their success, Vidal proposes a bigger heist but warns Angel that the second robbery is like the second boxing match or your second try at sex. It's not easier but harder. (In fact, the Spanish name for the film is Second Round.) Angel recruits his no-good druggie friend Dienteputo (Alberto Ferreiro) as a third man for the next heist, and that almost guarantees that things won't go as smoothly this time around.

Despite the boxing milieu and the crime story, The Good Boy is surprisingly low-voltage. It's neither a boxing flick nor a bank robbery flick. Instead, it turns out to be a rambling character study of Angel, a poor kid who is basically good, as the title suggests, but is easily pulled this way and that for better and for worse because of the humble circumstances of his life. If Vidal is a bank robber because he sees it as revenge on greedy capitalist pigs, Angel is a bank robber because Mom needs a new apartment and his girlfriend would like a new dress and a gym membership. It's really no more complicated than that.

Aka Segundo asalto.