The kidnapping of Quini becomes a tragicomic series in ‘For one hundred million’

BarcelonaThe saying goes that comedy is tragedy plus time, and this Thursday Movistar+ will put it to the test with the premiere of a series that recreates one of the events that gripped the country for almost a month: the kidnapping of player Enrique Castro, alias Quini. It was 1981, and groups like ETA or the Grapo resorted to quick kidnappings as a way to finance themselves. But the footballer's case deviated from this scheme, as the captors were a trio of people with no prior experience in crime, drowning in debt and who did not foresee all the complications – beyond the legal ones – that their action would entail. Por cien millones revisits the case, but from the perspective of these anti-heroes, to whom the creators apply a compassionate gaze.

Behind the series is Nacho G. Velilla, who has stood out for a career dedicated to observational humor and popular characters, with works such as Que se mueran los feos, Aída, or 7 vidas. To recreate those events, he has enlisted Raúl Arévalo, Vito Sanz, and Gabriel Guevara to play the three kidnappers and Agustín Otón in the role of Quini, the top scorer of that League who was chosen as the victim due to the bad luck of appearing in a gossip magazine that the criminals were browsing.

The action is condensed into three 50-minute episodes. The first focuses on getting to know the dire circumstances of the kidnappers' lives and the clumsy preparation of a heist that clearly exceeded their capabilities, although their amateurism distracted the police for almost a month. The second chapter narrates those days of captivity and the difficulties of keeping a person locked up in a hole dug in the workshop of one of the perpetrators' father-in-law. The final episode shows the trial, during which Quini renounced the compensation fixed by the judge and forgave the protagonist trio, who nonetheless received a ten-year prison sentence each, based on the criminal actions initiated by the club.

Velilla focuses, above all, on Alfonso, Raúl, and Salva, three unemployed men seeking to escape a desperate economic situation, who discover two things: that life is not like in the movies and that being bad, when one is good-natured, is not as easy as it seems. The creators of the series do not glorify the kidnappers' actions, but they do apply a tragicomic perspective, taking advantage of the distance of time. Their efforts, clearly beyond their means, are one of the driving forces behind the series' comedic element. In one scene, for example, they are shown unable to start the football star's car once they capture him leaving his house, because they have never seen how an automatic transmission works.

The lack of hope in a Spain where inflation stood at 14% and the unemployment rate was 11.2% is present not only in the motivations of the protagonist trio but also in the rest of the characters who accompany them, especially their families, unaware of the decision the kidnappers had made to get out of trouble. Velilla portrays everyday scenes that have nothing to do with the family plot, with a great profusion of custom-bound clichés and phraseology of almost lumpen characters, to show how the Spain of the time was a half-finished country, full of people who were being left behind.

There is also a portrait of the time. The kidnapping occurred just one week after Antonio Tejero's coup d'état on February 23. Democracy was not established and Por cien millones also portrays the kidnapping as part of the global disorientation of the time. The title refers to the amount of money the kidnappers demanded, much higher than that demanded in political kidnappings at the time. What they did not count on, due to sheer ignorance according to the series' vision, were the consequences of kidnapping a person who was not at all anonymous and was greatly beloved, the charismatic Quini, who led the team as the top scorer in a League that seemed secure but which Barça ended up losing when the club was destabilized by the case.

As is usual in these recreations, the series' creators remind us that historical liberties have been taken to round out the plots and dramatize some situations. The names of the kidnappers, who did not re-offend, have been altered. However, some of the locations are real, including the workshop where Quini was indeed held for those twenty-four days and developed a relationship of a certain empathy – or Stockholm syndrome – with the kidnappers. And one of the final scenes is also real, with great illustrative power about the insignificance of it all, in which one of the kidnapper's daughters who orchestrated the plot approaches the footballer, after the trial, and asks for an autograph, which the goalscorer grants.