


A grab bag of thriller tropes and action beats is tossed at another “human trafficking” thriller, this one from Spain, in “The Marked Woman.”
We’ve got an amnesiac with Jason Bourne skills. Because one never forgets one’s martial arts training. Apprently. She uses “Memento” Post-It notes to piece together clues from bits of memory. We’ve got shipping containers stuffed with human beings, “coded” bank accounts, dirty cops and a dogged loner detective soldiering on despite recent tragedy.
The film’s big takeway is that this modern day slave trade is not just a North American cinematic obsession.
Women kidnapped to be sex workers, refugees smuggled from Africa and Asia and South America into Europe or North America at their own peril, Chinese smuggled to staff (in indentured servitude) the world’s Asian eateries and the whole Trumpstein scandal — enveloping America’s and the world’s richest in a conspiracy involving pedophilia and blackmail, with Israeli intelligence involvement — all point to a global problem and the most predatory practices of “capitalism.”
Director Gabe Ibáñez and screenwriter Lara Sendim, adapting a novel by Rosa Montero and Olivier Truc, never quite get this beast up and running. It takes 24 minutes to get to the first action beat, and when our heroine (Ana Rujas) isn’t fighting, the picture struggles to hold our interest.
Rujas plays a woman found chained and tortured in a shipping container at the port of Barcelona.
We’ve met our victim as she furtively talked to another woman (Kira Miró) just after that second one has given testimony against a trafficking task force cop. under suspicion for being a mob “mole.” All this took place in Algeciras, the Spanish city adjoining Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean, months earlier.
The smugglers and the cops — clean ones and dirty ones — are in a race to find and question this anonymous amnesia victim, covered in car battery torture burns, before she remembers things that will bring this crime ring down, dragging a lot of people with it.
She has “something valuable,” (in Spanish or English or subtitled), “somehing ‘they’ don’t want you to share.”
The formidable Candela Peña (“All About My Mother,””Princesses”) is the 50ish detective sergeant, fresh off a tragedy and too anxious to get back to work. She draws this “case that nobody wants” and starts to work the clues with a reluctant junior partner (Carlos Troya).
There’s DNA at the crime scene, phone records to vet and a survivor to interrogate.
Meanwhile, the accused cop from Algeciras (Pol López) elbows his way north and into the investigation, even though nobody seems to trust him. An impending Internal Affairs hearing will do that to a guy.
The under-protected survivor has to kill her way out of being kidnapped again, and we’re off on a movie that blends the implausible (the amnesiac is dragged along on stakeouts) with the cliched, all of it covered at a snail’s pace.
“The Marked Woman” finds some suspense by the third act. It’s well-cast and a couple of the fights are first rate. But if you haven’t figured this clunker out an hour before the characters onscreen do, you’re not seeing enough thrillers.
Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Candela Peña, Ana Rujas, Pol López, Luka Peros, Manolo Solo and
Kira Miró
Credits: Directed by Gabe Ibáñez, scripted by Lara Sendim, based on the novel by Rosa Montero and Olivier Truc. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:49

