Parents' Guide to To the Max

Wanting to understand something isn't the same as understanding it. To the Max is framed as a documentary about the lives of five Spanish BASE jumpers, explaining themselves to an interviewer, and director Salvador Calvo clearly means the form as both homage and inquiry. He gets the homage right, but the inquiry goes nowhere, because there is nothing here beyond the fact that these were thrill junkies, and 113 minutes is a long time to sit with a single appetite. The documentary framing produces its own problem: since the interviews come first, these men narrate their own deaths, which is a strange thing to watch and stranger to think about afterward. Four of the five die across four years, and the repetition turns into a pattern that starts to feel purposeless. For a movie about the awe of flight, it's oddly paced and never once exciting. Ángel Iguácel's aerial photography is good without ever being astonishing.

The trouble starts in the writing, which never separates these men from each other. The exception is Miguel Ángel Silvestre as Darío Barrio, the celebrity chef the country already knew from television, and Silvestre has the charisma to make that recognition add depth to an otherwise thinly written role. Candela González gets the thankless job of Myriam and is given nothing to work with other than appearing in scenes where Carlos needs someone to yell at or a shoulder to cry on. The real-life Suárez died during preproduction of this film, and it was Myriam who decided the shoot should continue. That happened outside the movie. Inside it, she has no weight at all.