Though exceptions aren't hard to come by, most lovers-on-the-lam films end up in much the same place, with their protagonists facing a hail of gunfire and little chance of making it out alive. It's where they go in the meantime that matters. It takes some time to get anywhere, but Plata Quemada, based on the true story of a crime spree that spread across Argentina and Uruguay in 1965, makes some interesting stops as it goes. Eduardo Noriega and Leonardo Sbaraglia play a pair of criminals known as The Twins, though they look nothing alike and have a relationship that extends well beyond the fraternal. An inseparable pair with a nasty reputation for getting the job done so long as they work together, they need each other: Sbaraglia needs Noriega's spark of passion, while Noriega needs Sbaraglia to help keep the voices in his head at bay. Unconventional though it might be, their professional and personal partnership works well, until a heist gone wrong forces them to hit the road in the company of their fellow criminals. From there, director Marcelo Piñeyro launches a tour of the '60s-era South American underground. As The Twins and their colleagues avoid the law, they hit cheap hideouts, cheaper carnivals, beach parties, and grindhouses, all so well realized that the production design occasionally threatens to overwhelm the central relationship. Taking cues from The Krays and Dead Ringers, Piñeyro traces the dissolution of his symbiotic pairing as Noriega's interest drifts to drugs and Sbaraglia's to a woman (Leticia Brédice). Plata Quemada is paced a bit too leisurely to make as deep an impression as it otherwise might, but Piñeyro and his lead actors make it easy to admire their refusal to compromise the material. Nasty characters in almost all respects, Noriega and Sbaraglia remain sympathetic only because of the love they feel. Their relationship and what they find in each other—and virtually nothing else about them—lends the finale a tone of sad romance that the bare facts of the story do nothing to suggest.