It is claimed that La Casa de Papel became at a time, the Netflix most-watched show in a foreign language ever. Hard to believe how they manage to top Squid Game, the Korean show, but there’s time enough to reassess the balance. Anyway, for an absurd chain of heists in the Kingdom of Spain, almost as ridiculously put together as Prison Break, Money Heist swept viewers like a magnet in front of the screens. Maybe it was because Úrsula Corberó appeared totally nude for a fraction of a second in Quien mato a Bambi (2013), and viewers expected more of her flesh here, I don’t know, otherwise, her acting was a total disaster. Her disgusting frown during any activity demanding concentration is continuously off-putting.
Money Heist – La Casa de Papel – mixed team
[source: imdb.com]
Plot (at least at the beginning)
An introvertive guy, self nicknamed The Professor (El Profesor), plans on his own the attack of the Royal Mint of Spain, a place where the kingdom is printing its own Euros. He needs eight people which he recruited and trained at a property in the country. He seems frail and geeky, but he is very well trained in martial arts and has a physical condition to envy. The thing is that he will be the outside coordinator, not a participant. Anyway, that’s happening in the first two seasons. The advertising is that this team manages to steal €2.4bn. In fact, they manage to print some nine hundred million Euros and escape with some human damage. Doesn’t matter, because everyone will recursively appear during almost the whole season.
The initial team is formed by:
-Tokyo, the girl with shit brains who robbed chaotically all over Spain, and is snitched to the police by her mother;
-Berlin, a guy put in charge within the Royal Mint building. Spoiler or not, this one is sinister. I don’t say more. He seems smart and refined. He is not, he is a real prick;
-Río, a young boy who becomes Tokyo’s lover despite the complete ban over intimate relationships between members. Something dumb after all, because on the next heist they are all inter-related somehow;
-Denver, a macho with forty grams of the brain, otherwise a good guy. He’ll be on your radar till the end;
-Moscow (Moscú) is Denver’s father, an old robber with almost nothing to lose. He took Denver with him (I don’t know how they managed to be recruited together by the extremely meticulous Profesor) because they weren’t quite Academy material;
-Nairobi is a young Gypsy-like morena, very funny and genuinely talented in what she does;
-Helsinki and Oslo are a pair of Serbian mercenaries, a couple in and out of the heist. As you notice, this fact already breaks Professor’s rules about intimate relationships (an obvious flaw in the script). Maybe the same gender relations don’t count for the rules, only the straight ones.
Later, one more heist is concocted and executed at the Bank of Spain, more absurd than the first, which will make them a sort of national heroes. New characters are recruited and act as they were there all the time, new couples form, and the madness goes on. An intermediary heist is presented, just to confer some legitimacy to future actions, but it is clear that the last three seasons are created “on the road”, “by walking”, with a lot of patching, like a weekly TV show. If you have 41 hours of your life to spend binging La Casa de Papel, be my guest.
The show hints at a sort of anti-fascist attack on the Establishment, through the “Bella Ciao” song, the Italian communists’ hymn. They could add some Spanish songs too, but you are not progressive enough if you don’t close your eyes on the thirty years since Hitler’s demise, a time when your country supported a fascist regime that died from natural causes, not a “revolution”.
La Casa de Papel – incomplete Cast
Úrsula Corberó is Tokio, a sexy and emotionally unstable villain. The whole team but the Professor is pretty unstable. Itziar Ituño is Raquel Murillo, a police inspector. Esther Acebo is Mónica Gaztambide, a secretary or something. Álvaro Morte is El Profesor, the mastermind of all operations. Pedro Alonso is Berlín, a psychopathic villain. Miguel Herrán is Río, a little more than a kid, villain, and Tokyo’s lover. Jaime Lorente is Denver, a villain with a heart. Darko Peric is Helsinki, a Serbian gay villain, former mercenary in the former Yugoslavia. Enrique Arce is Arturo Román, the Director, or former Director of the Royal Mint of Spain. Alba Flores is Nairobi, a cute counterfeiter. Fernando Soto is Ángel, a policeman. Mario de la Rosa is Suárez, a special commando operations’ chief. Hovik Keuchkerian is Bogotá, who joined the team for the Bank of Spain’s heist. Roberto García Ruiz is Oslo, another Serbian, Helsinki’s partner in bed and war. Rodrigo De la Serna is Palermo, a gay psychopathic villain, a friend of Berlin who participated in the Bank of Spain heist’s planning. Najwa Nimri is Alicia Sierra, a sadistic pregnant police inspector. She (sort of) replaces Raquel, you’ll watch and see why. Predictable. Don’t read Wikipedia, it’s full of spoilers from the second paragraph. Fernando Cayo is Coronel Tamayo, a special intelligence guy in charge of operations at the Bank of Spain’s heist. Corrupt, not the smartest guy in the world, easy to manipulate, a sadistic himself. Belén Cuesta is Manila, a secondary character mixed with the hostages during the Bank of Spain’s heist. Paco Tous is Moscú (Moskow), the oldest villain in the team, Denver’s father. Juan Fernández is Coronel Prieto, a concrete rigid special intelligence guy, somehow in charge of the first heist’s crisis. Kiti Mánver is Raquel Murillo’s mentally deteriorating mother. Pep Munné is “Gobernador del Banco de España“, a civilized hostage. Diana Gómez is Tatiana, Berlin’s very short time adulterous wife. María Pedraza is Alison Parker, British Ambassador’s daughter, hostage in the Royal Mint of Spain’s heist, a model in the real life. She’s the one gratuitously showing some skin there, for a little fraction of a second, instead of Corberó. Her character could be Ugly Betty, her status as a special daughter was what actually mattered.
The End
To the moment, Money Heist is a Netflix action/drama show in five seasons (41 episodes). I’m not sure if the fifth season was also the last, but it looks as finished. Don’t take me wrong, please, La Casa de Papel was entertaining enough if they managed to acquire those ratings. People nowadays are very easily aroused by an attack against authority, but only theoretically. The rest of the time they keep their eyes ogled to what any WHO country liaison has to communicate on TV screens, vehemently condemning alternatives, and thickening the long rows to the slaughterhouse.
(Created Wednesday 29 December 2021, with thousand excuses for not publishing then.)
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