We have to talk about Rauw Alejandro in ‘Sky Rojo 3’ (and his nunchucks)

*This article contains spoilers for the third and final season of Sky Rojonow available on Netflix

He told us a few days ago Miguel Angel Silvestre who sky red it was not going to have a Disney ending. No, he doesn’t have it. Although it is a happy ending, with millions of quotes about that adjective, it is evident that the reference is not Disney. The reference had always been Kill Bill, Tarantino’s movie, and stays until the end. Including martial arts. It is at this point where our “we have to talk about rauw alejandro in Sky Red”. Let’s provoke a little bit, because this is also what the Netflix series is about: Does Rauw Alejandro pay homage to Kill Bill…

… or rather does it to The ninja turtles? First watch this video and then we rate it.

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What character does Rauw Alejandro play in ‘Sky Rojo 3’?

We understand that you are still processing what they do our beloved Lali Esposito and Rauw Alejandro, two of the most powerful Latino icons right now, in that video. Putting a little context of the series, let’s say that Wendy and Diego, the characters they play, perform a kind of courtship dance to measure the trust they can have in each other. A brief flashback: in their umpteenth escape from the hitmen, Wendy and her girlfriend run into Diego, a mechanic who buys and sells luxury cars, and they trick him into taking them to his workshop as a way to shelter. In that place, in addition to wheels and carburetors, he hoards katanas around a kind of tatami on which he projects movies of kicks and punches.

Why does Wendy take a stick and Diego some nunchucks? At Esquire we only know about martial arts what we learned by looking at the drawings of The ninja turtles, with which we can deduce that Wendy is Donatello, the turtle with the purple mask, and Diego is Michelangelo, the one with the orange mask. What deep meaning does this allusion hide? Well, whoever writes lives anchored in his pre-adolescence, because what has been the plot has no relation to this trance. A parenthesis that cuts the tone of what Lali had been offering (since when has Wendy been a karate fighter?) and that forces us to leave our ninja weapons on the ground to get slightly serious. We must insist on the question: what role does Rauw Alejando, or Diego, play in the outcome of Sky Red? To answer, we can be good or we can be bad.

Come on, we started off being good: the answer is in Coral’s final monologue, when they finally end the life of Romeo (Asier Etxandia), they burn the brothel with him inside and free the rest of the women victims of trafficking. “Although the road was long and full of demons, we also found angels fallen from heaven who helped us turn pain into hope,” says Verónica Sánchez’s character about images of Rauw Alejandro’s farewell. From Diego, sorry. The singer’s character is just that, an angel, almost the only one, who came across the lives of the girls and offered her support at the definitive moment. There is no turning back.

TAMARA ARRANZ

What if we are bad? Oh, if you provoke us. sky red It is a metaphor with the language of the action cinema of the Via Crucis that a woman victim of trafficking has to go through to escape from that hell. In this sense, it is logical that many licenses typical of this genre are taken to offer a show, but without losing the thread of the underlying message that is to be transmitted. Being honest, these licenses should not brush the reality criteria proposed by the series. Put more bluntly, Rauw Alejandro’s character doesn’t have any plot to join the girls’ revenge beyond “being good.” We do not know and will not know anything about him. That he went to Tenerife for love, they left him, and he set up his business. Well then. It is okay that he is a secondary that only appears in the last two chapters, but there is not a single line of text that justifies his actions. That justifies why he is risking his life by appearing before some thugs armed only with the damn nunchucks.

Why is Rauw Alejandro really in the end of ‘Sky Rojo’?

As a person born 30 years after the issuance of the drawings of The ninja turtles, We have no proof of what we are going to discuss, but neither do we have any doubts. It is the only reason why we can explain the presence of Rauw Alejandro at the end of sky red.

It is an assumption, we insist: at a given moment in the production of the final season, we suspect that with the scripts finished or even with the filming started, Netflix and/or Vancouver Media explored the possibility that the fashionable singer made a small paper. The ok is given by all parties. But as we pointed out in the lead, it is an irresistible bombshell at the media level but poisoned for the final result of the series.

The presence of Rauw Alejandro ensured headlines (so it was) and was gunpowder to feed the number of views of a series that was already a success in its first season but that in the second he gave clear signs that the story had entered a loop and could not be stretched any further. This has also been the case, since Sky Red 3 It has been at number 1 on Netflix Spain since its premiere on January 13.

Yes, the surprise signing of Rauw Alejandro has had the expected effect on a commercial level. But how has her presence affected the plot? Again we settle in the realm of assumptions: with the singer’s complex schedule, it is logical to think that he could only dedicate a limited time to filming. And that shows in the scenes in which he participates. As we said before, at the plot level it has a rickety justification. An adjunct to the script written under pressure and shoehorned in. A radically hollow character. And at the level of execution, the rush is also noticeable. Nor can we say that Rauw Alejandro does poorly as an actor. Rather, it is that, since there is no character to defend, he pulls on a cool roll, smiles from an announcement of veneers and an acceptable telegeny to save his presence on the screen. But since he acts on nothing, he inevitably causes a certain disconnection with the supposed climax that the viewer should be perceiving.

That effect is especially harmful in the final attack on Romeo’s club. We come from a handful of action scenes with a splendid invoice and with the characters at the height of their conflict, and just this one, which should be the end, is blurred. The moment in which he takes out the nunchucks in the middle of the firefight, feeling very sorry, borders on the embarrassment of others.

In conclusion, it is understandable that Netflix and Vancouver Media have been seduced by the idea of ​​having the Latin urban star, for being able to market a scene in which he practices martial arts with Lali Espósito on networks. Dynamite for likes. Unfortunately, at the same time it is a sign of mistrust towards the potential of a series that, yes, had its detractors for making a show of a subject as screwed up as the white slave trade, but it has also been faithful to that Tarantinian spirit of addressing such a conflict. terrible from the action and black humor. With the total commitment of a technical and artistic team and some actors who are indeed actors and who have really put everything on the grill for three years.

It is nothing new to sign very popular faces from any field to give morbillo and sex appeal to a production, but it is one thing to orchestrate a funny cameo and quite another to force it into the climax. A very dangerous precedent. Because at the same time it is a brilliant publicity hook and a lack of respect for those who really loved that project, on one side and on the other of the screen.