30/10/2024 - With six witnesses and three dead, the mystery behind an armed robbery on a bus spirals out of control in David Victori and Jordi Vallejo's Spanish-language Apple Original series

l-r: Viti Suárez, Xavi Sáez, Michelle Jenner, Elena Irureta, Paco Tous and Pilar Bergés in You Would Do It Too

An emergency call leads the police to an airport bus off the highway en route to the Catalonian city of Manresa, one hour outside of Barcelona. There, they find what appears to lead to an open-and-shut case: three dead robbers on the ground, five terrified passengers and an equally panicked bus driver. Those alive all report that a vigilante passenger shot the robbers dead and fled the scene — but none of them, strangely, can seem to remember what the vigilante looked like. Nothing is really as it seems in You Would Do It Too, a Spanish-language series making its debut today on Apple TV+, created and written by David Victori and Jordi Vallejo, with all episodes also directed by Victori. The episodic work attempts to interrogate the line between right and wrong and who really has the right to play judge, jury and executioner. Is it the authorities, citizens or no one at all?

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We quickly meet our cast of witnesses: Manuel (Paco Tous, of Money Heist), the bus driver; Balter (Viti Suárez), an antisocial kitchen worker; Margarita (Elena Irureta), an elderly grandmother; Elisa (Michelle Jenner, of Berlin), a cam worker and self-styled anarchist; Mr. Pineda (Xavi Sáez), a hot-tempered unemployed man and Miren (Pilar Bergés), a dog-walker. Victori and Vallejo also introduce our investigators through a classic setup between ex-lovers and accomplished police officers Fran (Pablo Molinero, of The Plague [+see also:
interview: Alberto Rodríguez and Rafae…
series profile]) and Rebeca (Ana Polvorosa, of Cable Girls), forced to work together on the case. Entangled further in this web are the mysterious vigilante passenger (José Manuel Poga, of Money Heist), ambitious young reporter Leyre (Mirela Balic) and the police chief (Ana Wegener), the latter two of whom know how to play the system to their advantage, regardless of the costs.

In its first episodes, the series plays out more as a conventional police procedural, even if the case itself is a peculiar one. However, things start to heat up and hit the fan at the series’ halfway point, when the creators pull out all the stops to thrill us through deception and narrative devices — reminiscent of the tools and tactics used on US conspiracy thriller series Quantico. While this works at first, it begins — as in Quantico — to grow gimmicky, where twists seem to pop out of the blue without warning, leaving the viewer unable to trust the narrative. Victori and Vallejo are able to hold our attention thanks to the episodes’ considerably short runtimes (most hover around 30 minutes), but the spiralling starts to grow less and less realistic in its later episodes, particularly owing to unbelievable character choices.

However, the cinematography by Elías M. Félix immediately stands out in episode one, where scenes on the bus are tense and grimy, with contrasting blue and orange lighting used to accentuate a pulpy, dangerous sort of feel. He also employs a fun camera technique often used in advertising, where the camera appears affixed to the barrel of a firearm, generating a sense of chaos as the weapon is swung around. Similar techniques to reenact the moment of the crime on the bus are employed in episode five along with effective whip-pans. Félix’s ability to lean into a thrilling form of play with the camera drastically heightens the series’ entertainment value.

Since so much of You Would Do It Too is dedicated to the purposefully convoluted mystery, however, the emotional storyline between Fran and Rebeca is also never fully fleshed out, leaving a glaring gap in the true core of the story. We are left with only haphazard encounters between the two that don’t provide any sort of stake in their relationship — personal or professional. The lack of emotional ties to the primary protagonists we’re meant to be rooting for makes the series much drier than it could be, with all of its topsy-turvy potential.

You Would Do It Too is a production by Legendary Television (USA) and ESPotlight Media (Spain). The series is making its debut globally as an Apple Original series after premiering in Spain on Disney+.