Grade: C-

“Burnt Money”=wasted time. This equation pretty much sums up Marcelo Pineyro’s heist movie, a Tarentino ripoff played at half-speed in which the homoerotic elements usually submerged beneath the surface in such flicks is instead put front and center. Though it’s based on an actual episode from the 1960s, its stylistic busyness–at times flashily baroque, at others languidly feverish, at still others ponderously weighty–never allows it to become remotely real. The central figures in the gang of Argentines who steal a pot of currency from a bank courier are two young lovers, Angel (Eduardo Noriega) and Nene (Leonardo Sbaraglia); the former is beautiful but moody, the latter less conventionally handsome but more assertive. In the course of the robbery Angel is wounded, and Nene insists on nursing him back to health and taking him along when the cohorts are forced to take refuge in Uruguay and arrange for the documents needed to take them even further from the scene of the crime.

While in Uruguay, however, the boys–along with determinedly straight colleague Cuervo (Pablo Echarri)–who are supposed to lie low, instead go stir crazy and begin scouring the countryside for fun. For some unexplained reason Angel spurns Nene’s advances, going into some sort of religious funk (I think); and in response Nene takes up with Giselle (Leticia Bredice), a prostitute with whom he plans to run away. Meanwhile the older, wiser member of the crew, Fontana (Ricardo Bartis) worries that his comrades will attract the cops by their actions. Ultimately Angel, Nene and Cuervo wind up in an Armageddon-like shootout with authorities while trapped in Giselle’s apartment, and what follows is a prolonged, splashy, over-the-top gorefest that puts anything in “Reservoir Dogs” to shame.

What sets “Money” apart from its many–and often superior–predecessors is a languid, operatic style and a floridly literary, pretentious narration, much of which would seem lifted from the novel by Ricardo Piglia on which it’s based. Unfortunately, those elements merely make what might have been a sharp, pungent variant of the old failed-robbery genre seem laughably florid and so slow that the every hole in the plot positively gapes. It’s disappointing, moreover, that the movie doesn’t give us any cleverness up front in terms of the actual heist; when one thinks of such obvious ancestors as “Rififi,” “The Asphalt Jungle” or “The Killing”–to name but a few–one of their most memorable aspects was the satisfyingly meticulous character of the job that nonetheless goes awry. Here the theft is just a simple stick-up, and its failure merely results from the fact that the perpetrators are clumsy and inept. That might be a sufficient premise for a comedy, but it’s an inadequate basis for a heavy, ponderous fable like this.

Presumably the makers believed that strong characters would compensate for the narrative weaknesses, but in that respect the picture fails, too. Angel and Neno are supposed to be a pair doomed by a crazy, fatal love–at least that’s what the windbag of a narrator suggests to us, and what the bombastic denouement argues–but their relationship is never successfully dramatized; their motives and choices remain obstinately opaque, and while Noriega and Sbaraglia appear to be competent actors, they’re unable to make the characters credible or even vaguely sympathetic. Noriega is certainly handsome enough, but most of the time he does little more than stare at us with Bambi-like soulful eyes. Sbaraglia is more animated, but his wildness comes across as a dramatic contrivance, as does that of Echarri as his straight colleague. The secondary figures are little more than sketches, and the performers can do little with them; only Dolores Fonzi, playing the nymphet Vivi whom Cuervo fondles and dumps, shows much energy.

In sum, “Burnt Money,” with its ostentatiously glossy surface, is just another example of style over substance, and the attempt to give it some heft through a gay subtext doesn’t improve matters much. By the close, all it succeeds in doing is making us feel the same crushing sense of cabin fever that its holed-up crooks are supposed to be experiencing. Luckily, we can escape by simply walking up the aisle; and you can avoid burning your hard-earned cash by not plunking it down at the boxoffice to begin with.