Simon, el gran varón (2002) User Reviews

Soap Opera based on the famous song. Sort of.

[elgatony · 6/10 · 25 July 2022]

Anyone who knows Willie Colon's famous Grammy nominated song "El Gran Varon" will automatically know the story of this film and its end--with some tweaks to the ending and the additional stunner of the identity of Simon's ONE romantic encounter.

The Good: The actors playing Simon's father and mother are excellent and their looong resumes on imdb prove they have chops worthy of being hired again & again. For a shot-on-video low budget producation, I actually found myself getting into the story.

The Bad: Pretty much everyone else.

The Ugly: This was shot on video so it looks as cheap as it was probably made. And yeah, the dvd doesn't make it obvious there are subtitles but there are and they're...mediocre at best in that there are gross misspellings, translations that don't quite match what they're saying and some dialogue is flat out omitted but it really doesn't spoil things that much.

Awful production of a bad story

[yadgiri · 1/10 · 15 February 2006]

The movie attempts to catalog the hardships of a homosexual boy having to cope with his father's expectations of being an Alpha male. While this subject itself could've been portrayed in a much more interesting manner the makers of this absurdity chose to play it more or less as a Mexican soap opera. Acting quality is for the most part horrendous and the production isn't far behind. Five minutes into the movie you begin wondering if its worth watching the rest and by the end, if you last that long, you'll have wasted 2 perfectly good hours you could've spent doing more constructive work.. like watch paint dry. What will keep you mildly amused though are the borderline nonsensical subtitles. Somebody needs to teach them punctuation and maybe donate a dictionary while they're at it.