All Hail – A Review

This movie made me question my belief in God. It made me wonder if life was truly meaningless, if everything just happens at random. So I searched for a book that could provide me with meaning and structure, a good book. I found Save the Cat. It’s true the popularity of Save the Cat as a screenwriting guide has made many Hollywood movies feel too similar. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when a story’s beats and key moments all fall in the same places. That said, All Hail, an Argentinian comedy new on Netflix, could have benefited from the book’s titular rule: show your protagonist doing something nice like helping an old lady or saving a cat’s life so the audience will root for them.

The film opens with grainy camcorder footage from 1997 showing a woman and her young daughter. From behind the camera, our hero Miguel Flores (Guillermo Francella) instructs the woman (his wife and the mother of his child) how to pose. Within seconds of the movie starting a bolt of lightning kills her. A jump to the present day shows Miguel strutting around as a beloved celebrity weatherman, all the while ignoring messages from his now adult daughter, the girl from the camcorder footage who lost her mother that day. Why would we like this guy?

Maybe he’s truly the villain. He is nice to his pet goldfish Osvaldo. But that’s in the shadow of ignoring his daughter who we just saw witness her own mother’s death by lightning all those years ago. His immediate comeuppance should feel good for us but we know and live in fear that everything will work out for this man. That God is not just.

Miguel is a superstar weatherman, his predictions so accurate that fans stop him on the street. He is known as the Infallible, and we contemplate if this is a direct affront to God. Not only that, he’s premiering a brand new prime time variety show that heavily features his forecast. Do Argentinian people really like weather reports that much? The demands of faith allow us to accept that any of this is plausible.

Miguel fails to predict a massive hailstorm that damages property, destroys vehicles, and most gruesomely kills a neighbor’s dog (we are shown the dog’s corpse carried away under a bloodsoaked sheet). Finally, the world turns against him as it should. The people curse him in the street. We are happy. But he has an escape. He flees Buenos Aires for his hometown of Córdoba.

There he is reunited with his daughter, who is now a doctor. Miguel meets one of her patients, a sick boy who idolizes Miguel and wants to be a weatherman when he grows up. And he will grow up, because this supposedly sick boy looks healthier than any kid I’ve ever seen. I guess they didn’t want to depress us too much by making a bedridden hospitalized kid look too sick.  Another lie. Miguel has already found people that love him again. It’s too easy.

The fact that he abandoned his daughter after the death of her mother is easily fixed too. They have one quick conversation about his emotional distance after Miguel walks in on her and her guest’s refueling with snacks after they had an apparent four person orgy. This orgy truly comes out of nowhere. The burning hole in their relationship is casually filled by a brief conversation about how he had feelings of sadness too when her mom died. Maybe it’s all a nod to Sodom and Gomorrah, because biblical fury is coming.

The movie solves Miguel’s career problems in the laziest way. He happens to find a mystical mysterious man in a bar who can predict the weather with 100% accuracy. He tells Miguel of hail the size of soccer balls about to descend upon Buenos Aires. Miguel rushes back to the city to warn the populace, but mostly to rebuild his reputation and get his show back.

The hail destroys monuments and neighborhoods. A 90-year-old man with tubes in his nose gives us the only funny scene in the movie. He is desperate to die and reacts with anger when his family saves his life by rolling him out of the way just as a giant ball of hail was about to cave in his skull. This ending would have been more dignified than seeing Miguel happy again.

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