Summary
As busily-plotted and enthusiastically clichéd as any thriller you’ve seen, a limp payoff prevents Intuition from even making good on its own ridiculousness.
Alejandro Montiel’s schlocky, plodding new Netflix thriller Intuition, a nominal prequel to the writer-director’s 2018 film Perdida, could quite easily be a parody if it had a slightly keener sense of humour. It opens with a thoroughly ridiculous maverick detective, Francisco Juanez (Joaquín Furriel), leading his sceptical colleagues to a serial kidnapper; the kind of show we’re watching couldn’t be clearer. Only Intuition isn’t a show, is it?
It certainly feels like one, less a feature-film than a few episodes of a police procedural strung rather artlessly together for mass consumption on Netflix, a platform that can cough up a powerfully evocative slice-of-life drama just as easily as a paint-by-numbers thriller such as this. As Juanez starts renegading his way through separate investigations while his rookie colleague Manuela “Pipa” Pelari (Luisana Lopilato) turns an inquisitive eye in his direction over some business of potential off-the-books revenge, Intuition seems uninterested in tying all this together into a cohesive narrative.
The script, in fact, seems rather pleased with itself, stretched over close to 120 minutes when with some judicious editing it could have been trimmed to a lean 90 and probably been better for it. The sense is of Juanez being able to carry such a busy plot on the sheer strength of his charism and catalogue handsomeness, but he’s such a silly creation that he, perhaps ironically, drags the whole endeavour down. There’s little chemistry where there should be plenty and little tension when it should be ramping all the way up – the overall effect is of a film that never gets out of second gear or, to keep an earlier metaphor going, a network show in its midseason.
None of this amounts to much. A perfunctory ending means that Intuition can’t even become greater than the sum of its parts or provide a surprising payoff to its own ridiculousness. It’s a disinterested shrug of a genre movie that does little to justify its own existence or satisfy the die-hard fans who’ll be into such a thing.
