In “La Máquina,” a Spanish-language series premiering Wednesday on Hulu, Gael García Bernal plays Esteban Osuna, nicknamed La Máquina, a middle-age boxer nearing the end of his career and ready for something else.
Knocked out before the first title card, Esteban has a full portfolio of sports-story challenges: Besides his failing but still impressive abilities, he’s an alcoholic (although sober when we meet him) and has began to hallucinate, a fact he keeps from his inquiring doctor and concerned, friendly ex-wife, Irasema (Eiza González), a sports journalist who would prefer that their two young sons not end up with a vegetable for a father.
Also being kept in the dark is Esteban‘s codependent manager and best and oldest friend, Andy (Diego Luna), who in turn is keeping Esteban in the dark about a Faustian bargain he made years before and which, as is the way with such contracts, has come back to bite them both.
Having unexpectedly won a rematch against the boxer who knocked him out, Esteban is being pushed by Andy, under threat himself, to accept a match against the current welterweight champion, which no viewer would expect to go well. Esteban‘s not so sure, himself.
“I’m done,” Esteban says.
“Just one more,” Andy pleads.
“I want to get fat. I want to eat whatever I crave. I want to be happy, fall in love.”
Irasema, meanwhile, has been wondering why “there’ve been more knockouts in the last five years than in the previous 20” and begins to investigate. She interviews an old boxer, suffering from dementia, who utters seemingly random numbers any viewer will recognize immediately as pregnant with dark meaning.
Going through the files of her late father, also a boxing journalist, Irasema stumbles upon a recording on which he says that boxing, being “the definition of the cultural moments of our time … can influence a country’s elections, and if you influence that, you control the stock markets, finances, everything. If you look into it in depth, you start to see patterns in the numbers in everything from a knockout to the price of gas in China.” Hmmm.
On the screen, boxing stories — dramas and comedies — go back before talkies. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd all made them. It was a popular genre through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s; many if not most of these films involve a criminal element, with racketeers fixing fights and boxers taking dives or putting themselves in danger by refusing to take a dive.
Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy, in “On the Waterfront,” could have been a contender if he hadn’t agreed to throw a fight. John Garfield, in “Body and Soul,” named the greatest boxing movie ever in 2014 by the Houston Boxing Hall of Fame, opted not to throw a fight. “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” originally made for television and later a film, hit themes of age and brain damage. In “The Harder They Fall,” Humphrey Bogart’s final picture, a boxer doesn’t realize that his whole career has been fixed. I don’t know whether Luna, Bernal and company studied these films in creating “La Máquina” — these tropes are all firmly embedded in the cultural imagination — but you can find echoes of them all in this series.
A shadowy organization lies in the background of “La Máquina,” and the mystery becomes secondary to the sports story. From left, Sixto (Jorge Perugorría), Andy Lujan (Diego Luna), Esteban Osuna (Gael García Bernal), Viejo Comisionada del Boxeo (Fermín Martínez) and Protasio (Mercito Gesta).
(Cristian Salvatierra / Hulu)
Bringing in the criminal element, of course, puts extra pressure on the characters beyond the question of whether an underdog will triumph or a washed-up competitor come back. Why it needed to be a mysterious omnipotent organization, I don’t know; perhaps plain old racketeers and crooked gamblers felt insufficiently nefarious to power a boxing story in 2024. As “La Máquina” goes on, the sports story becomes secondary to the mystery — the who and why of which nobody knows.
I would guess that “La Máquina” refers not only to Esteban’s nickname — asked why he’s called that, he replies, “Honestly, I don’t know” — but also to whatever shadowy mechanism he’s ensnared in, which endangers not only his and Andy’s lives but also those of their relatives and associates. This is the sort of super-powerful shadowy organizations we know from James Bond movies and the like — perhaps it’ll be Ernst Stavro Blofeld pulling the strings, white cat and all; it might as well be.
Developed from an idea by Luna and Bernal — friends, like Esteban and Andy, since childhood and co-stars over the years, beginning with “Y tu mamá también” — with Marco Ramirez as showrunner and Gabriel Ripstein directing throughout, it’s a strange, though not unwieldy amalgam of genres and tones. It’s a sports story, a conspiracy thriller, a mystery, a family drama and two or three varieties of love story. It’s straightforward, satirical, a little sentimental. It can get especially weird when it comes to Andy, with his dandyish clothing, his face-deforming beauty regime (Luna is hard to recognize), his affirmations and samurai workouts and his altogether too-close relationship with his mother (Lucía Méndez).
Esteban (Gael García Bernal) is given stirrings of a romance with Zamira (Dariam Coco).
(Nicole Franco / Hulu)
Other scenes, between Esteban and his ex-wife, Esteban and Andy, Esteban and his sons and Esteban and his trainer, Sixto (Jorge Perugorría), are written with great delicacy and genuine feeling; for all his lapses, the boxer is a sweet person, and Bernal turns in a lovely performance — you want to move in next door to him.
Happily, he’s given the stirrings of a romance, with a dancer (Dariam Coco) he meets at a party — she’s never heard of him, she’s young and uncorrupted, as far as we know — although it disappears from view, perhaps to be revived in a yet unseen final episode (five of six were offered for review), though given the tenor of the series, one hopes this won’t be only to make her a potential victim.
You can tell stories about people over and over — love stories, family stories, war stories, whatever — without repeating yourself because every individual character brings different possibilities to a situation. But conspiracy tales, however they’re dressed, are fundamentally the same; they have no personality, no heart and some version of the same limited goals (money, power), and while they may be clever, they are also kind of dumb.
I’m not saying that Luna, Bernal and company shouldn’t have gone down that road — everyone gets to make the art they want or are allowed to — but even as it’s meant to drive the drama, the conspiracy (whatever it turns out to be) is the least compelling element of a very rich series; indeed, with some clever editing, you could excise that storyline and still have a first-rate series about friendship, love and time. When “La Máquina” isn’t out to scare you, it can be quite beautiful, real, moving and delightful.