The House of Paper 5 Part 1, review: the beginning of the end

The House of Paper 5 Part 1, review

The first part of the last season (5 episodes of about 50 minutes each) of the Iberian series has finally arrived, officially available on Netflix since last September 3, and has become a real pop phenomenon that it will officially conclude on December 3rd with La Casa di Carta 5 Part 2, which will always consist of 5 episodes, perhaps finally giving a definitive closure to the events of the characters involved in another incredible robbery.

The House of Paper 5 Part 1, the beginning of the end

In the first two episodes of The House of Paper 5 Part 1, which we had reviewed in preview, the incredible plan that led to the evasion of Lisbon and at his daring entry into the Bank of Spain he had fatally distracted the Professor who had not calculated a variant: Alicia Sierra. In fact, the ex-inspectora, despite having been officially expelled by the police, had autonomously continued the investigations, thus succeeding in tracing the hiding place of the same Professor and keeping him at gunpoint.

While outside the police had begun to reorganize even airing the use of the army and the elite team led by Sagasta, inside the news of the Professor's capture had created tension and indecision in Tokyo, Denver and in all the others already very emotionally tried. This indecision had provided the usual opportunity for Arturo to unleash a revolt among the hostages who had barricaded themselves, triggering a violent firefight.

The police perceive that the occasion is propitious to break in and despite many protests, Sagasta and his men begin to prepare. Meanwhile, the Professor engages in a psychological battle with Sierra in the hope of being able to convince her not only to free him but even to ally with them. Just when the robbers have just regained control of the situation, the army assault begins.

However prepared, the robbers are not ready to face the army and its brutal and direct tactics. The firepower and preparation of Sagasta and his men seem to immediately crush the robbers. But, as in any self-respecting shot, ours too have a stroke of luck, indeed the Professor (buy his Funko POP on Amazon!) Has a stroke of luck managing to regain control and direct the "counteroffensive".

But the efforts made both internally and externally by the Professor himself could be in vain because what until then had been a battle of nerves and intellects has now turned into an all-out dirty war in which there seems to be nothing left but blood, tears and an incredible sacrifice.

The House of Paper 5 Part 1, the battlefield before the end

The House of Paper 5 Part 1 presses , as he had never done in previous seasons, on the action component of the series. It does not seem to be a random choice as it is not to relegate the heist component, the original one of the series, to a narrative vein in analysis apparently disconnected from the rest of the events and which has as its protagonist the unforgettable Berlin that remains, still and without a shadow of a doubt. , perhaps the best character of the series thanks to some abrasive jokes and the good proof of a disenchanted Pedro Alonso. It is also undoubted how everything will find a square of the circle in the second part of this last season but in the meantime it is impossible not to notice a "cleavage" between the present and the sequences in analessi.

Yes, because in addition to Berlin, c 'is also the one about Tokyo's past with the first meeting with the Professor before and with Rio after, perhaps the first would have also deserved a little more space. There is also the Stockholm lysergic sequence in the fifth and final episode which is a bit hasty and forced. All solutions already seen and typical of the canon of the series but slightly redundant.

If the first two episodes had highlighted the desire to push everything to the limit, by exaggerating, the whole La Casa di Carta 5 Part 1 is consistently grotesque and for this linear approach to the sound of gunshots towards an ending that passes through the usual, for the series, dramatic cliffhanger that deprives us of another important character.

In the first two episodes then the writers they had concentrated that mix of rhetoric, simple and pop, soap opera drama that in the following three episodes explodes definitively but against the background of long action sequences preparatory to exacerbate the souls of the protagonists always nervous and ready to make fatal mistakes in a tense game of deceptions and misdirection which still remains the trademark of the series, albeit less refined than in the beginning.

Unlikely and exaggerated, are the two adjectives that they are better suited to La Casa di Carta 5 Part 1. Impossible not to associate them, for example, with the twist that leads to the Professor's liberation, just as his men cannot be described as grotesque Sagasta or a team of elite soldiers who seem to arrive from a comic that gives a real theater of war. But this is the strength and magnetism that the series exerts on the general public, in a lesson metabolized in a personal way by some great Hollywood franchises, or to reabsorb these exaggerated, unlikely and grotesque elements within a broader scheme in which they are then the characters, and their interpersonal relationships and their life choices, to always focus the spectator's attention and empathy.

It must be said that some narrative and directorial solutions are no longer fresh. For example, the use of hostages on the roof as a diversion to balance the fortunes during the sortie of the army as well as the camera movements during the firefights or the nervous right / left alternation that slightly lowers the dynamism of the sequence (the actors almost always remain "motionless" entrenched or hidden) thus trying to simulate the unpredictability of a real firefight. On the other hand, there are also some new solutions such as first-person shots also with the help of GoPro-style shots.

Yet even in this juncture, in which the series, now in the pipeline, begins to take solutions already seen or used, manages to keep the spectator's attention high thanks to a well-tested formula strengthened in La Casa di Carta 5 Part 1 by the preponderance of the action component, and in which the objective of the screenwriters remains unchanged: to surprise the spectator even with apparently and exaggeratedly dramatic solutions. It is a choice that sacrifices in certain situations the quality, and the credibility understood as the realism of the series, but narratively and emotionally it pays off, see the character of Sierra or the aforementioned final cliffhanger.