La Casa is successful and, in fact, addictive watching, because it has the courage of its crazy convictions. Although the plot is ludicrous and many of the dramatic situations both contrived and absurd, the narrative barrels forward like a runaway train. The photography is luscious and the actors are all fantastically handsome or beautiful and each 45 minute show ends with a cliff-hanger. The characters are cartoonish but each is given several dimension, all equally stylized but, at least, complicating the show's ethical and moral themes -- everyone is ferocious in some ways and pitiable in others. The acting is similarly cartoonish, but highly effective. The best description for the show is that it is operatic -- everything is bigger than life and impossibly melodramatic and, before the audience can assimilate one plot point, the narrative has already careened to another. Although the show is a typical heist movie, albeit one elevated to grandiose proportions, there's no slow build-up of tension -- it's just one climax after another. Terrifying and, sometimes, gory crises follow one another without any respite and, indeed, sometimes several happen simultaneously with the show cutting frantically between different characters all facing mortal danger.
La Casa's premise is that a group of ethnically diverse and sexually liberated criminals have formed a gang to steal colossal amounts of money. The gang is lead by a shy, bespectacled mastermind, called (you guessed it) "the Professor". Everyone else in the gang is known by the names of cities that they have selected as noms de guerre -- so we have Denver, Rio, Palermo, Berlin, etc. The criminals, with whom we are invited (better said "compelled") to identify, are passionate, hair-trigger with respect to both love and violence, and politically sophisticated -- the show presents them as anarchic "freedom fighters" or members of the resistance. (One of the show's repeated motifs is "Bella, Ciao", an Italian anti-Fascist love song, unknown in this country, but, apparently, something with which everyone else in the world is familiar.) For plot reasons, the Professor manages and directs the heist remotely, from outside of the Bank or Mint that the gang is attacking. The Professor's remote-control management of the inside job, although not logical, allow the scriptwriters to develop virtually infinite narrative complications -- for instance, when things slow down inside the Bank or Mint, the authorities can mount an attack on the Professor who is on the outside; in some instances, the Professor is attacked at the same time the gang is under violent assault. The point is to expose the protagonists to as many avenues of attack and failure as possible -- this keeps the action moving at a frenetic pace. The show is lucidly written and clear -- if you watch the episodes with reasonable attention in sequence, you will understand exactly the stakes and the narrative trajectory. (This is unlike some HBO series, notably Westworld, which was so ineptly written, that no one could follow the plot.) Odd unresolved elements in the show are generally explained after two or three episodes. In the 2019 series, several plot points are left hanging -- but this is because the show has been so fantastically successful that there will be more sequels and these unresolved elements are planted to provide material for the next season's shows. (In fact, the 2019 series concludes on a cliffhanger note and without resolution of the main narrative -- clearly, so that the show can start up again in media res with its typical fast and furious pacing.) In the last four years or so, my criticism of shows of this sort is that they stretch the material too thin and there are long tedious digressions, or amplifications of plot points, intended merely to fill up the number of hours ordered for the series. La Casa doesn't suffer from this defect -- if anything, it has a surfeit of startling action.
In the 2019 series, the gang is reunited. Its members are now fantastically wealthy. In the 2015-2016 seasons, they successfully printed billions of dollars at the Spanish Royal Mint and got away with the money. The gang members are now living in various tropical paradises and spending a lot of pictorially impressive time on tropical beaches wearing tiny bikinis and sipping cool drinks. But Rio and his squeeze, Tokyo (with the Professor, the show's main character, and, in fact, the voice-over narrator) long for some excitement. Tokyo wants to go dancing and so she goes to the mainland from the tropical island where she is hiding out with Rio. Her phone calls to Rio are traced by Interpol and the island it attacked by sinister-looking cops. Rio is captured and taken to Algeria where he is brutally tortured by the Spanish security forces. (The head torturer is modeled on Gena Haspel, the CIA operative who ran covert black ops in Thailand or Laos. This character, named Alicia Sierra, is the show's chief innovation for the third and fourth seasons: heavily pregnant, Alicia sucks on lollipops and blithely brutalizes Rio -- she has him buried alive at one point. Alicia is one of the best characters in recent TV -- she's like the Joker, perpetually smirking, as she engages in all sorts of really savage villainy.) The gang members are wealthy beyond all dreams of avarice and so the writers have to come up with motives for them to risk their lives in the heist involving the Spanish National Bank. Rio's capture and extrajudicial detention with torture is the gang's principal motivation -- they have to act in such a way as to force the authorities to release Rio. (There's also a less convincing subplot involving the fact that the heist shown in seasons three and four was actually planned before the robbery of the Spanish Royal Mint featured in the first two seasons -- Berlin and the Professor who are brothers quarrel about which robbery should be first implemented and the heists are conceived as some sort of homage to their father who was killed in a bank robbery when they were younger.) In the previous two series, Berlin, who is a dying psychopath (he has Camille's syndrome: something lethal that is killing him without any apparent physical disability) was a very magnetic figure, presumably popular with the audience. And so Berlin, who was killed in the first heist, is revived by way of flashbacks to continue his mischief in the third and fourth series. (Other characters killed in the first two series, including Oslo and Denver's father, both of whom died in the heist, get encore performances in flashbacks as well.). New characters introduced in the last 16 episodes include, most notably, the pregnant torturer, Alicia Sierra, a flamboyantly homosexual psychopath named Palermo (he replaces Berlin as the "loose cannon" in the later series), and a transsexual, the beautiful Manila, who is planted among the hostages to spy on them. Another charismatic, if evil, character is Gandia, the head of security for the Bank, and a special op assassin who runs spectacularly amok in the last several episodes of the show. The gang is called the "Dali's" because they wear strangely endearing masks representing the mustachioed Salvador
Dali. Antonito, the corrupt bureaucrat at the Royal Mint, after losing his beautiful (pregnant) girlfriend to Denver (she's now called "Stockholm" signifying "the Stockholm Syndrome), has become a motivational speaker, but he's also a character too good to abandon -- the show contrives to get him back inside the heist where he feeds sedatives to female hostages and rapes them while they are knocked-out; Antonito is always getting well-deserved beatings from everyone in the show. The plot evolves like an Almodovar melodrama --everyone is sexually fluid (the philandering Berlin for instance passionately kisses Palermo and the girls always seem poised for a little Lesbian action), there are always about a half-dozen love affairs pending at any one time, and, everyone, is always pointing guns at everyone else. (Oddly enough the show, featuring spectacular thousand bullet shootouts with automatic weapons, is weirdly pacifist. -- the Professor abhors violence, although he has armed everyone to the teeth and only gang-members get killed: we don't ever see any police die or, even, get badly hurt (with one exception -- a rocket attack that the Dalis mount on armored personnel carriers but that's justified as self-defense). The show wants the audience to identify wholeheartedly with the criminals (it succeeds in this objective) and is squeamish about showing them committing any atrocities. The bad stuff, for instance Rio's torture, is all attributed to the security forces.
The show's twists and turns are much too complicated (and improbable) to recount. If suffices to say that the third and fourth series are much bigger, louder, and more grandiose than the already operatic action in the first two seasons. The 2019 show begins with two huge Zeppelins painted with Dali masks, bombing Madrid with several million Euros in cash so as to create a distraction. There are more explosions, machine gun firefights, and torrid love affairs (both hetero- and homosexual) in the 2019 series and the stakes are much higher -- the show involves a heist of 90 million tons of gold locked in a flooded subterranean vault as well as issues relating to the use of torture in the war against terrorism. A mob of rioters wearing Dali masks is involved in an uprising that seems prescient of the Black Lives Matter rebellion and there is lots of streetfighting with tear gas and cops in riot gear battling protesters. In some ways, the show resembles the quasi-science fiction elements of the old Mission Impossible TV show -- and this aspect of the film becomes more pronounced in the last three episodes in which there are special teams deployed in disguise to rig various rescues and escapes as well as all sorts of technology deployed to deceived the hard-pressed security forces. (By the last three shows, the producers seems to understand that there will necessarily be sequels and so, they relax the action and slow things down for the first time -- this is not a good idea because once the viewer has time to think about what is going on, the suspension of disbelief necessary to the show's suspense is diluted. The moment you start thinking about the on-screen action, you begin to question it -- this is why the program moves with such delirious abandon. Before the show loses intensity, however, it's extremely exciting in part because of the sheer and reckless accumulation of perils. At one point, Alicia Sierra is viciously interrogating Lisbon, the Professor's girlfriend who was previously his chief adversary in the first heist; simultaneously, the assassin Gandia is attacking the gang members from his bastion in a hidden "panic room" in the middle of the Bank; Antonito is scheming to lead a hostage rebellion; Tokyo is performing emergency surgery on the wounded Nairobi; and the security forces are poising their forces for a full frontal attack on the Bank -- and I've certainly left out some subplots, including Palermo's attempts to homosexually seduce Berlin in a flashback.
The plot is endlessly replicating -- it's a perpetual motion machine. And there is an odd Borgesian element to the narrative. The Professor and his gang have magical powers because they have all the money in the world (literally). This means that the Professor can enlist vast squadrons of accomplices at the drop of a hat. He has a group of crack computer hackers in Pakistan who have access to all the surveillance videos in the world and who can supervise surgery, for instance, by bringing in a local doctor to guide Tokyo's hand by Zoom conference. At one point, the plot needs a small army of miners and so these characters simply appear as if by magic to aid the Professor in digging a tunnel and creating false walls and doors and corridors (and, then, disguising themselves as cops, a judge, and a criminal suspect). Anything the Professor needs he can get. By contrast the Security forces are trapped in several tents, infiltrated by gangs sympathizers, surrounded and pinned down by angry mobs, crusading journalists, and their own legal system. The effect is that the Professor's conspiracy has an infinite reach -- it puts its tentacles everywhere including within the Security Forces themselves. This is a heist in which the gangsters vastly outnumber the cops who are trying to capture them.
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