'Heroes Wanted' - Movie Review

A Spanish movie about five loser cops and military staff who are brought together to form a new elite squad, essentially the Spanish equivalent of James Bond but several people. Except this is a comedy (if you can call it that). It seems that Spain (or director Joaquín Mazón) is about fifty years behind us on the concept of political correctness: more than half the jokes in this movie have to do with people's sexuality, accents, race, or disabilities. And it's also an amazing collection of clichés: there's barely a "plot twist" in the movie that a person over the age of 15 couldn't predict from seeing almost any previous lovable-band-of-losers movie.

SPOILER ALERT: you're not going to watch this terrible movie, are you? If for some reason you are, stop reading now. Let's outline the spectacularly clichéd structure ... The original "elite team" is killed off during the opening credits. We're introduced to the new band one by one, each showing their quirks. We have training scenes and montages, at which they fail. They're sent on a job. They fail. They're sent on another job, they fail again. It turns out the man who hired them has deliberately hired incompetent people to use as scapegoats, and when they find out the team falls apart. But eventually one of them figures out the evil plan, and brings the team back together to save the day. I'd outlined the whole thing by 15 minutes into the movie ...