Yucatán

They booked a working cruise and moved 100 people onto it.

Daniel Monzon's Yucatan is a Spanish con-man comedy about two cruise hustlers circling a baker who has just won 161 million euros. The better story is the shoot. latestnetflix.com's take is that a unit of about 100 boarded Pullmantur Cruises' MS Sovereign in Recife on 10 April 2016 and lived on the ship for 22 days while it ran a regular Brazil-to-Spain crossing.The buffet kept running. Passengers turned into extras. They got off in Barcelona. Wikipedia and the cruise trade press both treat that as the whole production plan, not a location unit that flew in for a weekend.,

Monzon and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria had already taken a research trip on the same ship. Monzon told Icruceros they met Captain Toledo, who opened the vessel, and that he now counts the captain as a friend. He told eCartelera the first script was even bigger. He told El Pais he had a name for the genre. A boat movie. Thriller, musical, drama, a little tenderness. He insisted it was not a desperate hunt for the gag, and that when he sent the pages to Luis Tosar and Rodrigo de la Serna they asked how far he wanted the comedy, because the script also had hard parts.,,

This is Tosar's third Monzon lead after Celda 211 and El Nino. Those two took 13.1 million euros and 16.2 million in Spain and stacked Goyas. Yucatan asks the Malamadre actor to play Lucas, a Mediterranean-route scammer who once split oceans with Clayderman after both fell for Veronica, the ship's dancer. Stephanie Cayo, the Peruvian actress, plays her. Joan Pera is Antonio, the lottery baker. Telecinco Cinema and Ikiru Films put it up. Hispano FoxFilm opened it in Spain on 31 August 2018. Monzon told El Pais a campaign that size is what American movies get, and that Spanish films are made for less than they cost. The official trailer still sells the Barcelona-to-Cancun duel.,,,

Boyero hated it. Opening weekend did not.

Carlos Boyero in El Pais called the result devastating. Nothing works, no grace, performances between inane and grotesque. Cinemania's Sergio F. Pinilla gave it four stars and listed musical glamour, rom-com absurdity, intrigue, and cartoon slapstick. Fotogramas's Sergi Sanchez also gave four. The first weekend took $1,240,253 and finished number one in Spain. After seven weeks it had more than 5.1 million euros, seventh among Spanish films in 2018. The only Gaudi nomination went to production manager Edmon Roch, which is the prize the 22-day crossing actually earned.,

Netflix put it on in the United States on 15 February 2019. Noel Murray in the Los Angeles Times wrote that it was shot on a real ship during an actual three-week transatlantic voyage, then compared the plotting to a 1970s Love Boat episode and still called it a mostly enjoyable ride, a throwback to glamorous old Hollywood, a serviceable facsimile of something fancy. That is the honest review. The making-of from 20th Century Fox Spain is the one with Pullmantur's hotel director talking about sharing corridors with a film crew. The movie is 129 minutes of hustlers missing each other on a ship that was, for three weeks, also their hotel.,,