La captura: El Chapo's Capture in a Tense Thriller on Netflix

On January 8, 2016, federal police officers Arturo Carmona and Héctor Rosales are on a normal patrol shift when an apparently routine check on a stolen car puts them in front of the most wanted man in all of Mexico, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. The drug lord has just managed to escape a special forces operation with one of his henchmen and has now fallen into the hands of the protagonists of La captura.

The protagonists now find themselves dealing with an extremely dangerous situation, as escorting the boss to the station means crossing a territory where the cartel's power is far more influential than that of institutions, and where every stop, every vehicle they encounter, and every potentially corrupt colleague can represent a potentially deadly threat. A threat also to their families, with Arturo, who is about to become a father again, fearing for the fate of his wife and children. The two agents will have to decide how to act, even in the face of the gangster's innumerable attempts to buy their complicity.

A Game of Chess

To tell the story of El Chapo without addressing the relative fascination of evil. This is the most interesting choice of director Chava Cartas - we remember him for the pleasant sci-fi comedy Nuestros tiempos: The Future is Now (2025) - who takes one of the most well-known events in recent Mexican criminal history and decides to observe it all from the point of view of the pair of agents who personally contributed to the capture.

The film precisely recounts those frantic phases where everything unfolded, trying to emphasize the tense soul of this reckless escape by the protagonists, who cannot trust anything or anyone while having to manage that "hot potato" that burns far more than it should. We thus find ourselves facing a thriller concentrated in a limited time frame, entrusted to two characters far from the classic stereotype of the action hero: few shots are fired here, and it's all played out in a psychological game, between motel rooms as improvised hideouts and attempts at corruption that could make even the most upright man waver. 

A Matter of Trust

Carmona and Rosales, played with the right grim determination by Alfonso Herrera and Noé Hernández, are two agents forced to work together, who show initial mutual distrust ready to become even more ambiguous when they both realize who they are dealing with. Can they truly trust their partner, in a context where anyone can already become their killer or betray them at the first opportunity? No grand words are needed to explain the trouble they've found themselves in; it just remains to be seen if they will be ready and determined to do the right thing despite everything working against them.

During the hour and a half of La captura, a duration perhaps too short but at the same time suitable for how the screenplay has orchestrated the story, violence often remains potential and precisely for this reason appears even more menacing, allowing the narrative to then abandon itself in the closing credits to the canonical explanatory texts that inform us about the fate of the real protagonists of the story.

There's no need to turn every encounter into a shootout, because it's enough to remind the viewer how the cartel's power can truly reach everywhere and that no place can be considered completely safe. A road check, a phone call, a suspicious vehicle, or a person who glances too much: today, anything can suddenly take on the meaning of imminent danger. It's a simple but effective mechanism, which perhaps is reiterated too much during the viewing but still manages to maintain the peak of suspense at good levels without any particular dead times.