Stories from the Kronen

Montxo Armendáriz has done much better work than this rendition to clichè in films about young lost teenagers. Historias del Kronen is a boring tour de force throughout the lives of a bunch of kids living it hard and loud in the spanish capital, Madrid. If you are into watching a dramatized european version of the superiorly achieved Kids but with higher classed boys and girls prancing around an importantly less developed script, you will surely like this. You will get your share of drugs, sex, stupidly rebellious behaviour, closeted gay characters; you will get your hero, shy guy, wiseguy bla bla bla. There are no plot twists whatsoever, you know from the beginning what we are supposed to think is wrong and right, and who is good and who is bad. You just patiently wait for the death sequence that is also supposed to turn into deep audience introspection about the miscarried youth of the 90's. Mr.Armendáriz might even think he has shocked you and made you see in a realistic way how the young unadapted mind mechanizes its own self destruction. After 15 minutes you just have to wait for the film to crash on its own pieces. You feel the pretentions in every dialogue and you can't but remember the mass quantities of times you have seen the same situations been caught in film and with much better results.