For two actors who have seemed almost inseparable since they burst onto the scene in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Y Tu Mamá También,” Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal actually haven’t acted together much. Sure, they recently went toe-to-toe with Bert and Ernie in a friendship quiz, but in terms of screen time, the duo have only appeared in three films together, counting “También” and the Will Ferrell curio “Casa de mi Padre.” Thus, Hulu’s first Spanish-Language series “La Máquina” feels like something of a homecoming for the two stars. Not only an opportunity to revisit their native country, but also charged dynamics that connected them in the first place, as well as a chance to expand Hulu’s reach.
Yet, “La Máquina” is something of a turducken, smashing together various genres, tones, and, unfortunately, acting styles in a jumble that soars in individual moments but doesn’t necessarily track episode-to-episode. A boxing story, a journalistic investigation, and a capitalistic farce all at once, the series wildly oscillates depending on who series director Gabriel Ripstein chooses to follow in a given moment. Instead, the three leads — including Eiza González— are seemingly in radically different shows, only forced to interact when the script demands overlap.
Initially, the show is about the titular Esteban ‘La Máquina’ Osuna (Bernal), an aging boxer who is knocked out in a title fight in the first few minutes of the pilot. Given a shot at redemption by his manager Andy (Luna), he begins training for another title bout. Throughout the entertaining and rollicking first episode, Esteban tries to manage his ailing body, alcoholism, and hallucinations, all a result of the wear and tear that boxing has had on him. What at first seems to be route — yet enjoyable — sports narrative shifts as the title rematch surprisingly happens at the end of the first episode and, even more shockingly, Esteban wins, despite his poor shape and drunkenness.
What’s slowly revealed across the first two episodes is that Andy has made deals with a faceless criminal organization throughout Esteban’s career, fixing fights without his knowledge, never asking when repayment might come. Yet, it does come, with the cartel demanding that Esteban lose his upcoming fight. The rest of the series tracks the increasingly dire stakes that Andy and Esteban find themselves in, while also following Esteban’s ex-wife Irasema, a journalist investigating the violent aftermath of fighters disobeying the cartel.
With these narratives spinning, only one is truly entertaining. That would be Luna’s comedy of errors, in which the almost unrecognizable actor makes a series of escalating poor decisions in an almost Coen Brothers-esque attempt to free Esteban and himself from the vice-grip of the faceless crime organization that he made a deal with. With his face frozen in a constant state of panic thanks to morning botox injections, Luna is frankly hilarious in a show that is never really a comedy. The delightful way he calls everyone an ‘asshole’ as a term of endearment, or how his life keeps getting worse as he struggles to balance Esteban with his overbearing mother and baby-crazed wife feels at home in a show with a much different tone.
Further, Bernal is a truly gifted actor, but with his current physique, he never truly feels like a boxer even past his prime. For how much the on-screen commentators talk about La Máquina’s brute-force power (including, in a hilariously odd cameo, Stephen A. Smith), one never gets the sense that Bernal’s character was ever terrifying in the ring. His increasing hallucinations speak to a tragic backstory relating to his father, but again the tonal whiplash dilutes much of the emotional impact.
González is also given the bones of an interesting subplot — her overlapping investigation into how boxers who go against the cartel are punished seems like it’ll lead somewhere — but her character is reduced to a concerned mother in the latter episodes when the violence starts to escalate against Esteban and his loved ones. Her character’s inclusion here feels aborted, as if the writers lost interest halfway through the series.
What remains is a show that works in fits and starts, coming alive when Luna is commanding the screen with his carnivalesque performance, and ebbing when the narrative shifts to Bernal or González’s characters. “La Máquina” is nevertheless an interesting reunion of the famed duo, but one hopes that they don’t wait as long for their next reunion, and that they choose more interesting material. [C]