Everybody Has a Plan

Viggo Mortensen may be best known as the noble hero Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but in this Argentinian neo-noir drama he plays not one but two unsavoury characters - and in Spanish. Pedro lives a modest, criminal life down by the delta, while his estranged twin Agustín is a city doctor who is being pressured into adopting a baby by his wife. When Pedro unexpectedly comes to visit, Agustín sees a way out of his middle-class prison and decides to take his brother's identity, but that road leads to him being implicated in a murder. Though it promises to be a taut crime thriller, debuting director Ana Piterbarg gets rather bogged down in Agustín's midlife crisis and this detracts from her confident handling of the scenes set in the Argentinian badlands. As a result, the film feels a little long and uneven, although Mortensen is quite superb as the two chalk-and-cheese brothers.