The Mallorca Files: "The Outlaw José Rey" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC Studios, Britbox, France Télévisions, ZDFNeo, Baleares Film Commission, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 1) KPBS ran a couple of episodes of the intriguing if sometimes rather arch British crime show The Mallorca Files, about a British woman, Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys), and a German man, Max Winter (Julian Looman), who end up reluctant police partners as detectives on the police force of Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain. One of last night’s episodes, “The Blue Feather,” was a quite good one I’d seen before (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-mallorca-files-blue-feather-2021.html); the other, which I watched last night with my husband Charles, was called “The Outlaw José Rey,” an obvious pun on the title of Clint Eastwood’s film The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). It wasn’t one of the better The Mallorca Files episodes, mainly because there were so few characters there weren’t enough suspects to make it a particularly compelling whodunit. The action centers around Rancho del Rey, a riding compound on Mallorca owned by cranky old grandfather Xisco Rey (Antonio Valero). He’s planning to retire and turn the reins, so to speak, over to his grandson José Rey (the drop-dead gorgeous Ben Cura) even though José wants to turn the place into a dude ranch for well-heeled tourists. To do that, José wants to borrow a lot of money, and Xisco has an old-school fear of taking on any debt. Added to the mix are an irascible stable manager, Javier Santos (José Luis García Pérez), whom we see in the opening scene throw a knife into a hay bale to express his displeasure at his daughter Belia (Lou Cosette) becoming engaged to José. At first Max and Miranda are sent to Rancho del Rey by their boss, Inéz Villegas (María Fernández Ache), to investigate credit-card fraud being perpetrated with a “skimmer,” a device inserted into the card reader to record the credit-card information of customers so it can later be used to run up unauthorized charges on their accounts.

José has been billing himself as recently returned to Mallorca following graduation from the London School of Economics, but it turns out he was really serving a sentence for fraud in a British prison. He attributes his crimes to surviving a particularly nasty divorce between his parents – his dad is dead but his mom, Pia (Paulina Galvéz), is alive and still living at Rancho del Rey – and insists he’s learned his lesson and reformed. It’s obvious writer Liz Lake (working from characters created by Dan Sefton) is setting up both José Rey and Javier Santos as red herrings. Midway through the episode grandfather Xisco is found fatally stabbed, and José flees into the surrounding countryside. Javier organizes a search party consisting of himself, Miranda and Max to look for him the next morning, explaining that he taught José the geography of the area and therefore he knows all José’s likely hiding places. There’s an amusing sequence in which Miranda shows that she knows how to ride a horse and Max shows that he doesn’t (yet another instance in which the writers of The Mallorca Files delight in exposing Max’s pretensions to butchness). Ultimately Javier finds José and rescues him from falling into a ravine despite their mutual hatred and José’s own insistence that he’d be better off dead (not that we believe him!). To no one’s particular surprise, it turns out to be Pia who killed Xisco in a drunken stupor – given that she’s the only other possible killer besides Javier and José, it wasn’t that hard to figure out – after Xisco turns out to have been behind the credit-card fraud, having known a lot more about computers than he let on. This show was reasonably entertaining and offered a lot of spectacular shots of the Mallorcan scenery (though, as with some previous The Mallorca Files episodes, no cinematographer is credited, and he or she definitely should have been). It also offered a lot of the cheesiest musical cues I’ve heard on an episode of anything, notably the Magnificent Seven-like theme as Javier, Miranda and Max ride through the Mallorcan countryside looking for the fugitive José. As with the cinematography, imdb.com doesn’t list any credit for the music, but it seems as if director Christiana Ebohon-Green contacted whatever stock music library they were using and said, “Give me all your most hackneyed ‘Western’ cues.”