"Hello. I'm Carlos Porta. Thanks for joining us." The journalist thus begins, with his narrative signature, the new miniseries recently released on Movistar+. The hunt for the lonely These are three chapters that explain the search for and capture of a robber who became Spain's most wanted criminal: thirty-six bank robberies in Spain, with two deaths and several injuries on his record, acting with absolute impunity for fourteen years. When you see the security camera images from some of the banks where this character robbed, you'll remember them from the news of the time. He was a man who disguised himself with a wig and false beard to enter branches armed with a submachine gun, easily emptying the magazine.
The hunt for the lonely fits the narrative we've already seen in Crimes, both to emphasize the director's authorship and on a visual level, with the unique feature that here, occasionally, we hear the voice of the killer, declaring himself an anarchist and anti-establishment figure and claiming to be a "bank expropriator." The resources of reenactments and the use of shadows are maintained to accentuate the mystery. The protagonists are the members of the Civil Guard and the National Police who participated in the investigation and who become the story's guiding thread. An amusing aspect of the agents' interventions is their use of their rigid administrative language combined with more colloquial slang: "When the robbery happens, we get involved, as they say, where fire" either "It must be taken into account that, since the robbery in Castejón, there has been a Kit Kat in his criminal life, a parenthesis.".
Now, what's most comical about this plot is that the narrative insists on projecting an image of professionalism and audacity in the Civil Guard and the National Police, when in reality, their level of effectiveness is rather precarious. A robber who committed almost forty serious crimes, who was active for fourteen years, whom the Civil Guard and the National Police sought separately, unaware that they were chasing the same person, whose identity they discovered because an ex-criminal identified him on television and tipped them off, who has him. They even proudly recount that one of the Civil Guards had the brilliant idea of putting pins on a map in the places where he had acted and connecting the dots with a string. "And the thread got tangled up," They say. They also explain that they stopped for a coffee on the highway because their eyes were closing while driving. The new true crime Carles Porta's film is more entertaining for its effort to turn the security forces into heroes than for the mystery of the robber.
