Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cassandro’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Frustratingly Superficial Biopic of a Lucha Libre Icon

Cassandro (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) might just be the most sensitive treatment of pro wrestling in cinema history. It’s the BOATS (Based On A True Story) biopic of real-life luchador Saul Armendariz, a.k.a. Cassandro, an openly gay pioneer of the… sport? Theatrical endeavor? Art? Art. Pro wrestling – like it or not – is definitely an art. Anyway, Gael Garcia Bernal plays the title character, and veteran director Roger Ross Williams ventures outside of documentary filmmaking for the first time, and the result is a little tame for a movie about larger-than-life personalities pretending to pummel each other.  

CASSANDRO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Before we get into it, a disclaimer: Pro wrestling is fake. No, really! It’s all staged! The wrestlers know who’s going to win before they even get into the ring! Which means lucha libre has more in common with telenovelas than MMA, and we get a nod to precisely that sentiment early in this movie, when Williams makes a point to stage a scene in which a daytime weepie melodrama plays on a television. Also important to know: Mexican wrestling matches always have a good guy and a bad guy. And among the bad guys are characters dubbed “exoticos,” cross-dressing flamboyantly gay caricatures who always, always lost. It was tradition. In a spo- er, art that glorifies machismo, the queers always got smeared, and were frequently met with homophobic chants from the audience.

This is the crucial context for the story of Cassandro (Bernal). He was born Saul Armendariz, the son of Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa), a Mexican immigrant living in El Paso. We meet Saul as he dons a traditional luchador mask and becomes El Topo, a “runt” predetermined to get his ass beat by a brute known as El Gigantico. Saul loooooves lucha libre, and has since he was a kid, when he watched it with his father, who’s out of the picture now because he couldn’t deal with his son being gay; Saul being the product of an extramarital affair didn’t help, either. Anyway, Saul does his lucha thing in Ciudad Juarez, then walks back across the border to El Paso, where he helps his mother with her humble in-home laundry and clothes-mending service. They’re tight, Saul and Yocasta. He’s a mama’s boy in a sweet, tender, not too codependent kind of way. She’s all he really has. One minute, she wants him to settle down with a nice boy, and the next, she laments that he came out and drove away his father, who she apparently still loves after all these years, despite his prejudices.

Hoping to take his wrestling endeavors up a notch, Saul begins training with Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), a wrestler known as Lady Anarquia, who urges him to become an exotico. “But they don’t let exoticos win,” he protests. But when he makes his debut as Cassandro, maskless, heavy with blush and eyeliner, and wearing little cutoff shorts, he wins in a different way, creating a character so charismatically likable, the crowd shouts his name even though he loses the match. His popularity draws in a promoter (Joaquin Cosio) who doesn’t seem to care that “exoticos never win” as long as it makes some good scratch. He stages a bout for Cassandro to emerge victorious, a gamble that pays off so well, it results in a Success Montage for smiley Saul. He achieves some fame and has some personal ups and downs and the movie builds to a Big Match in Mexico City against lucha superstar El Hijo del Santo, which might just change the public perception of exoticos for the better.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Cassandro might be a lightly studio-compromised version of the highly literate wrestling screenplay John Turturro tortured himself over in Barton Fink. It also resides somewhere between the goofball comedy of Nacho Libre and the gruesome realities of The Wrestler. (Come to think of it, Cassandro‘s unofficial title might be Macho Libre.) And if you’ve seen the 2019 documentary Cassandro The Exotico, you’ll be very familiar with the beats of this story.

Performance Worth Watching: Bernal does his damnedest to fill in the gaps of a mediocre screenplay with a thoughtful and inspired performance. Without him, Cassandro would be wholly forgettable. 

Memorable Dialogue: Saul sums up his father issues concisely: “He’s a lot into Jesus.”

Sex and Skin: Bernal and Raul Castillo do a little grunting and thrusting (and wrestling, of course!) in bed, but it’s all shot from the waist up.

Our Take: For lack of a better word, I wrestled with Cassandro’s unavoidable mixed-baggedness. Bernal’s winning performance carries the film, and he has excellent chemistry with De La Rosa, who together kindle weighty sentiment in several rock-solid dramatic scenes. And there’s no fighting the cocklewarming BOATS story of a man who dreamt big and achieved significant things personally and culturally.

But Williams doesn’t dial up enough rah-rah enthusiasm, resulting in an emotionally muted picture that lacks vibrancy – especially for a movie full of flamboyantly garbed luchadors – and at times feels frustratingly superficial. The filmmaker fudges the timeline enough that we’re distracted by how-old-is-he/what-year-is-it confusion, which distracts us from Bernal’s efforts to deepen his character. The film comes to life during sequences that, in similar pictures, are notoriously cliched: The montage, surprise surprise, is lively and clever. And for the big third-act match, Williams foregoes music and TV-announcer commentary for realism, emphasizing the roar of the crowd, the whump of the mat and the outsized pantomime of the sportly art of “big time” wrestling, where grand symbolic gestures usher in a hopeful era of acceptance. 

But beyond that? We get wheezy basic biopic fodder that’s been gassed for decades, only rudimentary insights into lucha libre tradition and culture, and an underdeveloped Psych-101 father-issues arc. Cassandro is OK as is, but it leaves the nagging feeling that it could’ve been better – and, crucially, a lot more fun.  

Our Call: This is a disappointing B-minus/C-plus of a movie that makes you feel good when it should make you feel great. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.