Luis Llosa makes thrillers about quiet professionals in hostile places, and he is better in a jungle with one camera than in a hotel with two stars. The Hollywood films are competently built and thinly written; the Peruvian ones are where he seems to care.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in the middle of The Specialist (1994), Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone finally get into the same shower, and Llosa films it as steam and slow dissolves, like an advertisement for something expensive. It is the scene the whole film has been building towards, and we felt nothing except a mild embarrassment for two actors who have been better elsewhere. That is Llosa's Hollywood in one sequence: the money is on the screen, the stars are in position, and nobody has worked out what these people want from each other.
He came up through television in Peru in the late 1970s and 1980s, including the series Gamboa, then made cheap English-language pictures for Roger Corman, among them Hour of the Assassin (1987), before the studios called. Sniper (1993) put Tom Berenger in a jungle with a rifle and a job and let the heat and the waiting do most of the work; it knew exactly what size of film it was. The Specialist came next, with more money and a John Barry score, and then Anaconda (1997), a creature feature with Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Jon Voight that was not kindly reviewed and has since found an audience anyway. After that he went home. The Feast of the Goat (2005), which he also wrote, adapts Mario Vargas Llosa's novel about the Trujillo dictatorship, and Tatuajes en la memoria (2024), from Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez's memoir of Peru's internal conflict, has a screenplay by Vargas Llosa. Llosa calls it, in Spanish, his most personal film.
What works is the outdoors. He is good at tension in a remote place, at a practical effect going off on cue, at a location that looks as though it might kill the cast, and that is why Sniper holds and why Anaconda is still watched. What does not work is the writing. His characters are issued a trade and a rule and little else, and when the plot needs a turn it takes one whether or not anyone in the story has a reason to. The Specialist is the clearest case: 110 minutes of revenge thriller that keeps its two leads at opposite ends of a telephone line, so that the only person on screen who appears to be enjoying himself is James Woods. The later Peruvian films at least begin from books with people in them, which is more than Alexandra Seros's script gave him.
If you want the Hollywood Llosa, go to Sniper before The Specialist; it is the smaller film and the surer one. We have not yet reviewed the Peruvian work and would like to, since a director who spent the 1990s blowing up Miami hotels and then went home to film a dictatorship is at least worth following. Just do not expect the people to be the point. In a Llosa film it is usually the place.
Biography
Luis Llosa is a Peruvian film director and producer. He directed the action films Sniper (1993), The Specialist (1994) and Anaconda (1997).
Llosa began his career as a film critic before moving into directing and producing. He founded Iguana Productions and has also directed The Feast of the Goat (2005). He is a cousin of the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.
