Winner of five awards at the prestigious MTV Movie Awards in Mexico, including Worst Smoker and Best Diego Luna in a Movie, Nicotina is the kind of movie only a person with a short attention span could love. Borrowing heavily in style and frivolity from Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, this real-time dark comedy casts Diego Luna as a pervert and computer hacker who delivers the wrong computer disc to his superior in the Russian mafia. One misunderstanding leads to another and soon everyone, from the local barber and his greedy wife to a pharmacist and his sexually frustrated honey, is involved in a heist that promises a secret stash of diamonds to the person with the upper hand. Though a cockroach is responsible for triggering the first of many comic murders, the film’s connective tissue is the cigarette in everyone’s hands and the smoke that pours out of their lungs. Using quirky sound effects and punchy transitions to piece together what amounts to an elaborate smoking metaphor, director Hugo Rodríguez means to liken everyone’s involvement in the film’s heist-gone-wrong to the desire to light up. Though Rodríguez is dedicated to contrasting the domino effect of the film’s crimes to a spreading addiction, this association lacks moral consequence. Because Nicotina is scarcely concerned with the way cultural influences color or inspire people’s behavior (not to mention the “secondhand smoke” of how that behavior influences others), the smoke that powers its narrative reveals itself to be a lot of hot air.
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