Intacto (2003)

This sleek, stylish thriller suggests that luck is a quality we possess, like strength or intelligence, but the more fortunate among us can steal the luck of those less charmed. When a bank robber named Tomas is the only survivor of a plane wreck, the luckless Federico thinks he's found the man who can defeat the Jew--the luckiest man alive, a Holocaust survivor who sits at the apex of a weird, underground world of increasingly dangerous gambles. But on their trail is a police detective named Sara who's pretty lucky herself--and as she learns more about how luck works, she begins to suspect she survived a car crash because she stole the luck of her husband and child, both of whom died. The stealthy story is packed with eerie visuals and charismatic performances, including Max von Sydow (truly one of the greatest actors alive) as the Jew. --Bret Fetzer Amazon.com

Purely luck???

The idea of this movie is that some people can steal luck from others.

The idea is brillant, but this movie could have been so much better.
I'm a big fan of foreign movies and I have seen this one on the shelf for years, but just got around to watching it.

The story moves at a good pace, but sputters in several places before a so, so ending!

Intacto (Intact) is worth seeing, only once! May 13, 2008

Excellento.

Intacto (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2001)

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later...) began his feature film career with Intacto, an intriguing meditation on the nature of luck that wouldn't be out of place on your shelf beside El Laberinto del Fauno. While Fresnadillo stays tied much more rightly to the real world than Guillermo del Toro did in 2006's best film, the sense of wonder that pervades del Toro's masterpiece can be found here in equal amounts.

Fresnadillo's script, co-written with Andres Koppel, centers on Federico (Eusebio Poncela), who begins the film in the inner circle of the unnaturally lucky. He is employed as a cooler at a casino, but he works in a different way than most: by touching someone, he is capable of stealing that person's store of luck and adding it to his own. When he finds himself wanting to leave the job, he finds he's not allowed to leave with his stored luck; Samuel (Max von Sydow), the man behind all this, steals Federico's luck before allowing him to leave. Federico develops an obsession for finding others like him, training them, and overthrowing Samuel. To this end, he finds Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the lone survivor of a plane crash. Unfortunately, Tomas is a bank robber, so the law, in the form of Sara (Monica Lopez), is after him. Federico introduces Tomas to the world of "fluid luck", for lack of a better term, and the two of them, with Sara always in pursuit, get closer and closer to Federico's goal and the inevitable meeting with Samuel.

Despite the fact that this is a gritty, understated film-- it would not be outside the realm of validity to call it an urban fantasy-- Fresnadillo does not limit the scope of his vision to the concrete landscapes around him. This is a remarkably free-feeling film; I can't think of any other way to describe it. (This is depicted, specifically, in the casino, which is in a secluded place in the desert, well away from the rest of civilization.) The relentless realism with which it is filmed combines with the ludicrous premise to create a feeling that anything is possible, and that's what keeps the viewer riveted, even more so than the gloomy cinematography, the finely-tuned performances, or the truly original plot. An excellent piece of work all around. **** November 1, 2007

Great story!

I didn't mind the subtitles at all, for this movie has a great deal going on and you are soon submerged in the story. A man who survived a Nazi concentration camp believes good and bad luck can be 'transferred'. He runs a casino where luck is vital to the players and many often have 'high stakes' in some bizarre games played behind closed doors. For some, it appears they do have extraordinary 'luck', but can life's events really be that simple? I was very surprised by the ending and it prompted a long discussion between my husband and myself as to whether good luck actually exists for some and not others.

Chrissy K. McVay - Author July 1, 2007

what's luck got to do with it?

The odd thing when you watch the opening scene of Intacto is a weird feeling of deja vu as you realize the opening scene of the Cooler appears to be stolen from Intacto which predates it by two years. That said, I would agree with the more critical person who said that the logic of luck in the Cooler is a bit easier to follow that the concept of luck employed in Intacto. (The Cooler has its own problems, however.)

Possible spoiler alert. Like the Cooler, Intacto has a kind of feel-good message underneath it that love and emotion eventually have some impact on luck in the end, which doesn't quite work for me, honestly, especially not in this one. In order to get us there, the script connives to get the hero to wager unknowingly the luck of a woman he loves but that forced plot development seems simply to raise lots of questions about the mechanism of the bets and how a simple photograph carries with it anything about the person if that person has not agreed to surrender their luck (as seemed to be necessarily the case in another sequence); it confuses the issue of how exactly the luck obtaining process, which the film depicts but glosses over in the details, is supposed to really work. And it also just feels wrong in a movie of ideas like this one to imply so simplistically that true selfless love is supposed to bring good results (ergo the people who died in the camps instead of the Luckiest man in the world didn't love and so they didn't have luck?). Perhaps the filmmaker has a completely well thought out explanation of it all but it doesn't quite come across in the film and so it's hard to feel by the end of it any real satisfaction in the plot events.

Intacto does contain a number of very memorable and distinctive scenes of luck challenges or contests: the forest scene being probably the best of them. This is an odd film overall but it has a certain strange charm to it despite its pronounced failings, so I could see things to be gained from watching it if you're interested in the luck theme as I was. March 12, 2007

Facinating blend of 'Deer Hunter' Premise and Twilight Zone

`Intacto', the Spanish language film directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is an ingenious take on an idea seemingly borrowed from `The Deer Hunter', with a bit of subtle sci-fi theming worthy of Rod Serling's `The Twilight Zone'. The impact of the supernatural theme is made convincing by the appearance of the great Max Von Sydow in an important supporting role. His appearance in all those spooky early Ingemar Bergman movies makes his character all that more credible.

The story is a bit thin. All the interest in the movie revolves around the characters' participation in highly dangerous, some even fatal games of chance, much like the Russian roulette theme from `The Deer Hunter'. While the attraction in `The Deer Hunter' is purely an addiction to the thrill of the risk, the attraction is both more subtle and stronger in `Intacto'.

I'm a big fan of the director's commentary on movies like this, but I found the commentary just a bit thin here. It did very little to explain the basic premise, it's development, or its origins.

The movie is not as deep or as emotionally involving as Bergman's `The Magician' or `The Virgin Spring' or Fellini's `La Dolce Vita'. The characters are thrill seekers with little depth, but the subtly supernatural premise and the way the story is told makes the trip interesting.
March 10, 2007

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