Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Code Name: Emperor’ on Netflix, a Tangled Spanish Political Thriller Starring Luis Tosar as an Amoral Protagonist

This week’s onslaught of new content from Netflix includes Code Name: Emperor, a perfectly capable Spanish thriller about a guy who’s sometimes good and sometimes bad and, for too long, hasn’t cared whether he’s either. Veteran actor Luis Tosar lends his exquisitely weathered visage to a character who’s like a spider in a web of political intrigue, except there are other spiders in the web that are bigger and more powerful than him. See, he didn’t spin the web, he’s just climbing nimbly through it – and possibly realizing it’s time to get out, maybe spin his own web, have his own little spider babies or something. I’m extrapolating here. The movie’s nicely suggestive in that way, as I’ll explain in further detail here.

CODE NAME: EMPEROR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: MADRID. Wendy (Alexandra Masangkay) walks home alone at night. A van pulls up alongside her and two men jump out, grab her and force her into the back. The camera sticks with her point-of-view, goggling and shaking as a third person, a rescuer, fights off the kidnappers. That man is Juan (Luis Tosar), but when he introduces himself, he lies and says his name is Alex. He gives her a ride home, although it’s not her home; she works as a frock-and-apron housekeeper for a rich family. Alex-who-is-actually-Juan knows this. He staged Wendy’s mugging so he could gain entry to the house and surreptitiously hide spycams here and there. Not such a nice guy after all, is he? But there’s much more on the line here – the homeowners are smuggling radioactive cobalt to Neo-Nazi terrorist groups.

Juan works for an agency doing, well, whatever needs to be done within that amoral gray zone. You have to break some eggs in order etc. etc., and he’ll break ’em for you. I’d like to see his business card: Juan – Cleaner/Spy/Detective/Manipulator Supreme. Of course, he almost certainly doesn’t have a business card. Guys like him don’t really exist, or have feelings. We see him on concurrent gigs. In one, a soccer player assaulted his girlfriend and the cops are on the way; in order to make it look like a violent burglary attempt, Juan talks the poor woman out of going public, then makes sure her creep of a boyfriend ends up bloody and hospitalized too. Gotta be authentic. In others, Juan goes to Panama City and Budapest to meet with shady guys for this blackmail deal or that drug-related operation, which distract us from the more interesting stuff happening in the main plot.

Some of that stuff involves spying on a politician (Denis Gomez), hoping to get some dirt on the guy. When he turns up squeaky-clean, Juan’s boss, Galan (Miguel Rallan), instructs him to frame the poor guy. It’s just politics, and politics is war, and all’s fair, and all that. Maybe that’s starting to nag at Juan’s conscience. Just a little. Why is he suddenly developing ethical boundaries? Might have something to do with Wendy. Remember her? He meets up with her again. They go to a movie. They end up shtoinking in a hotel. They repeat the sequence of events a few times. That’s their thing. She doesn’t know he used her like a pawn in an ugly, ugly political chess game. She may just be a foreigner in the country without her papers in order, too. (Say it with me: I FEEL LIKE I’M SITTING ON AN ATOMIC BOMB, WAITING FOR IT TO GO OFF.) Maybe, just maybe, this job didn’t leach all of Juan’s humanity out of him and let it wash down the drain to drown in sewage.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I’d love to eavesdrop on Juan and Michael Clayton sharing war stories over a leisurely bloody-mary brunch.

Performance Worth Watching: Tosar is rock-solid as a guy who does all manner of terrible things, but whose nonverbals tell us he’d maybe rather be a little less lonely.

Memorable Dialogue: Juan finds common ground between his empty life and Wendy’s transient one: “Everything in a suitcase.”

Sex and Skin: Three Stylized Non-Nude Sex Scenes, or SNNSSes – prounounced “snisses,” if you please.

Our Take: So did Juan’s emotional isolation make him good at his job, or did his demanding job make him emotionally isolated? That’s the dramatic crux of Code Name: Emperor, which is ever-so-slightly at war with itself, as the elements of a suspenseful political thriller bump up against those of a subtle character study. The thriller wins, but at least the character study gets the last word, so let’s call it a draw.

The overarching plot is formulaic enough that we never truly question whether Juan will decide it’s time to drop the “a” from his amoral existence. It’s the how that keeps us watching – he uses and exploits vulnerable people in the pursuit of an agenda that maybe, at one time, held the greater good in higher esteem. But it, and he, seem to have slipped into some ethically treacherous waters, surely to benefit a select powerful few. Corruption can really sneak up on a person, can’t it? And even though it’s not explicitly stated, it seems as if Juan realizes he’s being exploited too. It’s like the cycle of abuse.

So it’s the ideas at play in the movie that keep the plot churning, and drawing our interest. Director Jorge Coira competently handles a complex screenplay (by Jorge Guerricaecheverria) entangling moderately exciting action, moderately tender romance, moderately intriguing political drama and moderately tense close scrapes. It’s not exceptional, but it rests on a sturdy foundation. You’ll wish Coira had trimmed some extraneous scenes and made it a lean, mean 90 minutes; you’ll wish Wendy was more of a character and less of a calculated plot device written to be a catalyst for the protagonist’s change. But as it stands, there’s strong filmmaking here and plenty of thematic food for thought, something maybe half the films you’ll ever see can rightfully claim.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Code Name: Emperor doesn’t challenge genre conventions, but it’s worth watching for making us wonder where politics and the human soul converge and diverge.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.