Stream It Or Skip It: ‘XTREME’ on Netflix, A Gory, Propulsive Action Thriller With Barcelona As Its Battleground (2024)

If you want blood, you got it. Xtreme (Netflix) crests on a wave of henchman body counts, but as a revenge thriller it also elicits strong work from its single minded cast — the hero, a wronged hitman, his small team of supporters, and of course the handful of baddies he’s devoted his life to destroying. What? They did it to him first!

XTREME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Xtreme is titled Xtremo in its original Spanish livery, so it’s crafty to keep the ‘X’ as the lead for the domestic Netflix version. Like the crossed Samurai swords that figure into its plotting, this is a film that slices off extraneous elements and gets right to the guts of the matter. In this case, that’s Maximo, or Max (played with sturdy gusto by Teo Garcia), who works as a hitman for a Barcelona crime family. Xtreme opens almost exactly in the middle of a gun battle as the hubris of Lucero (Oscar Jaenada) leads him to forsake the delicate relationships his aged crime boss father developed with other families in the “conclave.” Lucero kills first, doesn’t ask questions later, and is okay with fear as a motivator. And this is in spite of his dad having sent him to Japan to learn about respect from the Yakuza. Not only that, but Lucero resents how his father favored his adopted siblings, enforcer Max and financial whiz Maria (Andrea Duro). That ends badly for dear old dad.

Leaving no loose ends in his quest for control, Lucero lays waste to Max’s personal life, forcing him into hiding. Two years go by, and he befriends Leo (Oscar Casas), a loose-limbed smart aleck street dealer whose supplier turns out to be connected to Lucero’s operation. Leo reminds Max of what he lost in the violence of Lucero’s hostile takeover, and as he and Maria continue to lay their revenge trap for their psycho loose cannon brother, Leo’s presence is both hindrance and help to their damaged souls.

There is violence at every turn in Xtreme as Max punches, kicks, shoots, and otherwise destroys lowly bad guys on his quest to reach Lucero. But those bad guys give as good as they get, too, with a bunch of bad guy-on-bad guy violence. Apparently, Barcelona’s drug trade is brokered by Spaniards, Chinese, and Russians, with supply chain support from Colombia, and everybody is greedy, untrusting, armed up, and devoid of scruples. And as the showdown with Lucero looms, Max keeps finding fresh ways to dispatch the muscle sent to silence him, even as he protects Leo and his trusty vintage Porsche 944.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Remember how those Russian goons should never have killed John Wick’s dog? It’s like that. Once Max is set off by a truthfully very much more awful murder by Lucero’s chief goon, Xtreme is set on its one-dimensional course of destruction. It’s conducted with style, brutality, and stylish brutality, but still, it’s one-dimensional. Lucero’s henchmen in the final sequence even wear black tailored suits over white shirts in a nod to the Wick saga. And if it’s more Keanu Reeves references you want, well, that third act fight sequence also features hundreds of 5.56mm rounds chewing into cement pillars a la The Matrix.

Performance Worth Watching: Toss up! In revenge thrillers of Xtreme‘s ilk, the gunplay and bloodshed aren’t really warranted unless the bad element unleashing all of this carnage truly drips with a particular kind of psychopathic sleaze, and X has its scum down pat with pretender boss to the crime family throne Lucero, played by Oscar Jaenada, and Sergio Peris-Mecheta as Lucero’s murderous right hand Finito. These two blend the gruesome with gallows humor and just the right amount of preening — check out Lucero’s costly but style-devoid threads — to make their screen presence much more than emptily violent.

Memorable Dialogue: Maximo is a man of few words, so let’s let his sister Maria lay out what drives them as she attempts to console their young friend Leo. “They killed his son two years ago,” she says of Max. “They killed my father, too. I completely understand your pain. It’s the same one that breaks and destroys us every single day. It doesn’t let you move on or forget.”

Sex and Skin: Maria takes a shower. It’s blurry. There’s some manner of suggestion here that, as adoptive siblings, something more might be happening between Maria and Max, but that is never explored.

Our Take: As Max, Teo Garcia has his stolid gaze fully calibrated. He doesn’t need to elaborate very much — we see him fight, we see him train; we see him give a sh*t when Lucero’s underlings bust up Leo’s guitar hand. But when Max finally does vocalize his intentions, there’s clarity there, too. “Running away isn’t my style,” he tells Maria, as if we ever thought it would be. There’s also this. “There’s only one plan,” he tells her as henchmen descend on his auto shop hideout. “I’m going to kill them all.” And he resolutely loads a magazine into a nail gun.

That brief bit of dialogue opens a one-two punch of fight sequences in Xtreme that propel it to its final boss moment with bloodsoaked glee. Gun fights are one thing, and Xtreme definitely has a few of those, particularly the one that takes place almost entirely wreathed in the smoke of a disco’s dance floor. But a movie like this must concoct novel death blows for true street cred, and it doesn’t disappoint in that. When those goons hit him at home, Max retaliates with said nail gun, heavy-duty bolt cutters, billy clubs, the seatbelt of a subcompact, the notched posts of a car seat headrest, and the momentum of the car itself as a guy is thrown through the windshield to land in a heap underneath a hydraulic lift. You can imagine how that goes for him. And none of this mayhem is to take away from Max moments in earlier fights, such as the dagger he puts through one henchman’s neck, only to remove it and toss it into another attacker’s forehead. Or how about picture hanging tacks? John Wick might’ve killed a guy with a pencil, but Max is ready to wreak havoc with pretty much anything sharp and handy.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Gird yourself for blood spatter, bones cracking, and shots fired. But Xtreme knows exactly what kind of movie it’s making, and amplifies the representative elements with style, dark humor, and murderous pizzazz.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Xtreme on Netflix