REVIEW: ‘Untamed Royals’ Needs To Lighten Up

Directed by Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz, Untamed Royals (Delincuentes) is another long line of dark, boring, unimaginative Netflix Originals. This time, a group of uber-wealthy punks commit increasingly less petty crimes against their parents and the parents of their friends until everyone around them is even more miserable than they already were.

First of all, this movie is painfully dark. The color grading is so poor that you will hardly want to watch it from the moment the movie starts. Movies do not look good when they are impossible to see. It doesn’t make them more moody or atmospheric; it just makes them ugly. Especially when there are no other discerning qualities about Untamed Royals like a drop of color or characters with any ounce of interesting personality. Undoing the horrible color grading probably wouldn’t make this movie any better, but it certainly wouldn’t have bombed it in the first 90 seconds.

It does actually start on an exciting note. Untamed Royals drops into a sort of cold open where first Xavi (Juan Pablo Fuentes Acevedo) tells his therapist that lying turns him on; then he goes home to his unattentive rich parents and a massive mission where he is violently robbed. Sort of. It’s quickly revealed that his best friend Gerardo (Fernando Cattori) is behind it, and Xavi was in on it the whole time. It’s briefly exciting before things are quickly weighed down by dull acting and increasingly obnoxious behavior.

It’s hard to feel too bad for these kids when they are just so brutally unlikable. You can’t sympathize with them very well because they’re just horrible people. Even if you’re shown over and over how annoying their parents are, they don’t seem all that bad, as far as rich parents in movies can go. Their love interests are also fairly one-dimensional, which includes Xavi having a massive crush on his sister (Ximena Lamadrid), which simply does not work in anybody’s favor.

Adding in a number of graphic scenes only makes it worse. The way the camera cuts in certain explicit directions feels exploitative—as if the women in Untamed Royals are only in the movie to be looked at objectively, the way Xavi and Gerardo do. Although, there is one shot that goes in the opposite direction, so, at least, there’s that. But when the girls are finally in a position where you think they’re going to get their comeuppance against the boys, it just leads to confusion and a lack of clarity over how they feel and their involvement in the boys’ crimes.

There’s also a whole crooked cop layer to this movie that makes very little sense. You get constant allusions to Xavi’s powerful and furious grandfather and his connections with the police, and yet, none of that plotline feels like it goes anywhere valuable. It just adds more violence and aggregation to the plot and its culmination. The whole movie ends on this plot beat and it’s deeply confusing.

Untamed Royals is confusing, bland, and unpleasant to look at. It is a dreadful combination hardly worth the hour and a half spent. Despite some decent ideas, they’re all half-baked and result in muddled action and mixed messages about how the audience is supposed to feel about this group of brats.

Untamed Royals is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.