El Trayecto (2024)

There's a particular kind of disappointment that comes not from a film being outright terrible, but from it being stubbornly, persistently fine. El Trayecto is that kind of film. I watched it as part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, picking it to represent the Dominican Republic, and I came away feeling almost nothing. Not angry, not charmed. Just sort of... there.

It's billed as a comedy. That's the genre it occupies on paper, anyway. The problem is that I didn't laugh once. Not even a smile. Not even a quiet exhale through the nose that occasionally passes for amusement late at night when you're watching something on your own. Comedy is the hardest genre to pull off because it has an immediate, binary verdict: either you find it funny, or you don't. And I didn't. That's not a small failing for a comedy. That's the whole game.

What I can say in the film's favour is that the four central characters are each distinct enough to at least keep you engaged at a basic level. There's some effort gone into giving them their own personalities, their own rhythms, and that stops the whole thing collapsing into background noise. You can tell them apart, you can follow who wants what and why, and that counts for something. It's just that being able to follow the characters and actually caring about them are two very different things, and the film never quite gets me across that second threshold.

The Dominican Republic itself, though, is genuinely gorgeous. Whatever the film's shortcomings, the location does a lot of heavy lifting. There are stretches where I was more interested in the landscape behind the characters than in whatever was happening between them, which probably tells you something. If the film functions as an accidental tourism reel for the island, then fair enough, it succeeds at that.

And then there's the obligatory bit where a bloke gets his penis out. I've noticed this keeps coming up in Spanish-language comedies. It seems to be a reliable go-to move in the genre, a guaranteed laugh supposedly baked into the script before a word of dialogue is written. Maybe it lands for other audiences. It didn't land for me here, though I'll admit I wasn't entirely surprised to see it arrive.

The thing is, I don't want to be too hard on El Trayecto. It's not offensive, it's not incompetent, and it's clearly made with some affection. The A-Z World Movie Tour has thrown some genuinely rough films at me, and this isn't one of them. But "not rough" isn't really a recommendation, is it. Two stars feels right because there's enough craft on the screen to avoid the bottom of the barrel, but not nearly enough wit or warmth to justify anything higher. Below average. That's the honest verdict.

If you're curious about the Dominican Republic from a cinema perspective, I suspect there are richer entries into the country's film culture than this one. I'll keep looking. The tour continues.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2024  | Watched: 2025-06-10

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