Every year, countless philosophy majors graduate from college, arguably even less employable than when they entered it. What happens to all these lost souls, who tend to be versed in Kant but hopelessly ill-prepared for real-world demands? The once-ubiquitous but thankfully thinning herd of Quentin Tarantino-inspired black comedies provides a surprising answer: Many seem to have entered into low-level criminal careers, which afford them plenty of downtime in which to ponder fate, destiny, and other weighty issues.
The darkly comic Mexican thriller Nicotina features a pair of such philosophically inclined hoods (Lucas Crespi and Jesús Ochoa), who engage in spirited debate en route to a business meeting with a Russian gangster looking to exchange diamonds for valuable computer codes. The supplier of those codes is Diego Luna, a lovelorn hacker whose technological savvy comes in handy when he wants to spy on a pretty neighbor, though his hobby backfires when he accidentally delivers footage of the neighbor rather than the requested data. The sketchily laid plan goes predictably awry and the plot doubles back on itself, drawing in such easily corruptible civilians as a domineering pharmacist, his long-suffering wife, and the bickering married proprietors of a struggling barber shop.
Writer Martín Salinas sends his hapless mortals down a grimly deterministic path before bludgeoning them with the apocalyptic fury of an Old Testament God. Worshipping unabashedly at Tarantino's altar, director Hugo Rodríguez follows brazenly in the master's footsteps, employing corpses as comic props, deaths as punchlines, and cigarettes as an all-purpose signifier of outlaw cool. Still, Nicotina's lack of originality ultimately proves forgivable. Its glib, heartless nihilism doesn't.