A Time for Bravery, or La hora de los valientes, is a Mexican film streaming on Netflix that can be mostly defined as a buddy cop film with ample amounts of action, comedy, and even drama to some extent. The plot follows Mariano Silverstein, a professional psychologist who is tasked with accompanying an aggrieved police officer, Diaz, on his usual work schedule, as he soon gets entangled in a dangerous and corrupt situation. A Time for Bravery makes for an overall entertaining watch, and is recommended if you are looking for a mostly mindless but rooted action comedy.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
A Time for Bravery begins with two men sitting down for a meeting with their boss, as they have recently joined a team that is clearly up to something mysterious and probably highly illegal. Considering the secrecy that needs to be maintained about the job, which involves a stolen truck and a robbery, the boss asks his two employees whether they have told anyone about this side hustle that they have recently taken up. The scene turns violent very quickly, as one of the employees is shot dead clearly because he had spilled the secret to someone and was now lying about it. The other employee is manipulated into admitting that he has indeed told someone close about his new job, and he too is killed in the most gruesome manner. As becomes clear at the local police station the next day, these two men were ex-soldiers in the Mexican army whose wives have now reported them missing.
At the police station, officers Montijo and Ugarte speak to the Commissioner about the mental well-being of their dear colleague and friend, officer Diaz, who is in absolute disarray. Just a few moments ago, Diaz had found out that his beloved wife had been cheating on him, and so he is emotionally broken at the moment. Montijo and Ugarte want the Commissioner to assign Diaz to any investigation, as staying busy will keep him away from the sad and negative thoughts that he has been having. In fact, Ugarte has a better plan—to have the police department help Diaz directly by having a psychologist talk to him and teach him to control his emotions. The Commissioner agrees, and he soon gets a professional psychologist named Mariano Silverstein to come down to the police station for an introduction to what his responsibility is going to be.
As it turns out, Mariano Silverstein had been involved in a road accident a few months ago, in which he had hit a pedestrian with his car, for which the court has sentenced him to some sort of community service. Therefore, the police department now makes use of his professional qualifications to put him to Diaz’s use, treating this as community service. Silverstein is asked to spend the entire day with Officer Diaz and accompany him even during his investigation into the missing ex-soldiers. Although the psychologist is extremely nervous about it, since being with a police officer throughout the day could put him in dangerous situations as well, he has no choice but to agree.
Did Silverstein help Diaz?
Silverstein starts the day trying to understand exactly what is upsetting Diaz even now, a week after his discovery of his wife’s unfaithfulness. He learns that Diaz had followed his wife around one night after having grown suspicious and had realized that she was regularly cheating on him with a coworker. But crucially, Diaz had not confronted her after his discovery, and his wife actually has no idea that he knows what she has been up to behind his back. The police officer further reveals that he has been married for four years now, and although he himself had cheated on his wife a number of times in this while, he is absolutely shattered to have found out about her infidelity. Funnily enough, Diaz never told her what he had done with other women, meaning that he has already been keeping her in the dark the same way that she has been doing with him.
But simply the discovery of the affair has made Diaz aggressive and anxious, even though he has not been able to muster up the courage to confront her. It is evident that his inability to confront her is based on the very fact that he too is guilty of unfaithful behavior. But it has some other means of expression for the police officer, which Silverstein notices very quickly and is understandably alarmed by. Diaz keeps driving very aggressively and running traffic lights at every intersection, and at certain moments, he is very close to losing control and crashing into other cars. He also starts smoking up at one point, despite being on police duty and despite being behind the wheel of a car. All of this is his means to cope with the grief and the guilt that have been troubling him internally.
Most importantly, Diaz is still technically with his wife, as in living with her pretending like nothing has happened, as he has not confronted her about her affair. Silverstein pokes into his mind further to realize that Diaz is actually scared of being separated from his wife and ending up alone, because of which he has not been able to come clean to her, and this, in turn, is causing him to be sad at all times. Therefore, he convinces him to confront his wife, and Diaz ends up doing so just a few minutes later, in the very middle of the investigation, and although the phone call has him angrily shouting, it ends up helping him tremendously. With the anguish and the frustration out of the way, only the grief regarding the possibility of separating from his wife remains, which is bound to go away very quickly.
How does Diaz expose Diana’s secret?
Silverstein is able to successfully carry out the job he had been given, and while doing so, he grows sympathetic towards his patient, and seeing Diaz sad, he invites him to dinner at his house. Silverstein’s wife, Diana, is quite surprised and a bit irritated at her husband bringing a guest home unannounced, but she still bears with the situation. Despite Silverstein asking her to not be too romantic in front of the police officer, as such scenes might remind him of his wife and make him sadder, Diana often gets close to her husband like they usually do in their regular lives. Seeing this does not make Diaz sad, but it definitely turns him suspicious, especially when she gives a complicated and roundabout answer to Silverstein’s very simple question of how her day was.
As a result, Diaz now confronts Diana and even pulls out his gun and points it at her, threatening her to reveal the truth about her extramarital affair. Silverstein’s advice earlier in the day had turned the police officer confrontational with everyone, and so he now did not hesitate to do the same with the very host of the dinner. Some of the matters that Diaz considers to be clues turn out to be mistakes, like how he feels that Diana was not wearing her engagement ring because she was cheating on her husband, while in reality she and Silverstein do not have rings, as they are not officially married. But his hunch turns out to be correct, as Diana ends up revealing how she has been sleeping around with a teacher at a literature workshop that she had attended.
It is clear that Diana had been somewhat manipulated into sleeping with the literature teacher, who had put to use some twisted interpretation of “Madame Bovary” to fabricate her consent, and she had also believed that Silverstein had already cheated on her by this time, which was untrue. The couple have a big fight based on the misunderstanding, and although they will eventually forgive each other and move on with their lives in the film, Silverstein leaves his home at the moment and moves in with Diaz. In a cruel, but also funny, twist of fate, Diaz ends up consoling and trying to help the psychologist who had been appointed to help him at the beginning of the day.
Why is the police investigation halted?
Meanwhile, Diaz also has to investigate the case of the missing ex-army men, and Silverstein also gets dragged into it as he accompanies the police officer literally everywhere. The two men, Montero and Casasola, are found dead just a few days after their disappearance, inside a stolen van that had crashed into a hyacinth-covered lake. But the post-mortem examination on the bodies reveals that they had been shot dead and then dumped into the lake in a manner to make it look like an accident. The film also confirms that we saw these two men being killed at the very beginning, and the mystery grows more intense. Marks on their hands suggest that they had been handling something very heavy for a long time, and the investigators reach the army office for further clues.
They soon visit the safehouse of one of Diaz’s old friends, known on the streets as the Accountant, who happens to be the owner of a car theft racket. Diaz obviously wants more information about the stolen van in which the dead bodies had been found, but the Accountant openly states that he did not have anything to do with the matter. However, one of the lower-ranked employees at the safehouse, Chucky, is soon revealed to have been working for his old boss, Oscar, secretly, and it was he who had been hired to steal the truck and leave it in front of the military complex. Chucky does not have any more information to provide, but he does lead Diaz and Sliverstein to the restaurant where he had been given the details of the job and also points them to the man who had hired him.
This man, named Lisandro Prada, acts very suspicious from the very beginning, and he refuses to tell the police anything, even threatening them instead. He acts very high and mighty, clearly because he has some significant backing, and ultimately Prada reveals himself to be an officer of the National Intelligence Agency. Soon, Diaz and Silverstein are arrested and taken to the NIA headquarters, and although the psychologist is ultimately allowed to leave, Diaz is held behind bars at the place. The head of the NIA, Solares, assures Silverstein and the Commissioner of the federal police that they had been investigating the ex-soldiers for quite some time, because of which they cannot reveal anything about their unnatural deaths, and the case is finally brought to a halt.
Who are the real perpetrators, and what is their plan?
At the center of the plot in A Time for Bravery is systemic corruption, for it is Solares, the head of the National Intelligence Agency of Mexico, who is the main perpetrator, as he had made an elaborate plan to engineer nuclear bombs and most likely sell them to the highest bidder on the black market. Recently, a private company called Camarasa had been granted permission by the National Atomic Energy Commission to collect all nuclear waste from the Laguna Verde nuclear plant. Solares had targeted this very heap of nuclear waste, for it was bound to contain large deposits of uranium, which could be used to make atomic bombs. But in order to steal the uranium, a special kind of container that is used to store the radioactive metal had to be acquired first, and only the Mexican army manufactured such containers, specifically for the Laguna Verde nuclear plant. Therefore, Solares had appointed the two ex-army men, Montero and Casasola, to steal the container and bring it to the safehouse in the stolen van.
The two men were expendable and had to be eliminated to keep the matter a secret, which is why they were killed by Solares’ right-hand man, Prada. Next, the team got fake IDs made for Prada and a few others to make it look like they work for Camarasa so they could enter the company’s premises and steal the uranium by putting it into the specialized containers. But as Diaz and Silverstein come snooping around, their plan has to be put on hold, since the federal police officer can easily expose their secret operation. It is for this very reason that Solares holds Diaz captive at his office, intending to fish out information about his investigation first so that he can be killed afterwards. The corruption runs so deep that the men working for Solares are all NIA officers, and he even forces the Commissioner to stay out of the matter by threatening to expose his corrupt acts otherwise.
Can the perpetrators be stopped in the end?
Once Silverstein figures out the entire matter and also realizes that Diaz, whom he now considers to be a good friend, is in extreme danger, he decides to take things into his own hands and rescue him from the NIA headquarters. Crucially, Silverstone had stood up to the corruption a few hours earlier, when he had revealed to everyone at the police station that Diaz is being targeted only because the corrupt NIA bosses fear that he will easily bring an end to their corrupt plan. Although none of the police officers could do anything at the time because of the Commissioner’s presence, they ultimately decide to stand up to their immoral bosses and support their colleague and friend. Thus, a group of the police officers also reach the NIA headquarters, where Diaz is rescued and Solares is held hostage so that he can be punished for his corruption. The group then flies to the Camarasa factory, where they have to stop the men from stealing the uranium as well. Ultimately, Solares is arrested, and his corrupt acts are exposed, while his plan to steal uranium and make atomic bombs is also brought to an end.
Is Silverstein actually a spy?
In A Time for Bravery’s ending, another high-ranking officer of the National Intelligence Agency approaches Diaz and Silverstein with a very special offer—he wants to recruit them to a sort of international security agency that he has been putting together. Silverstein initially declines the offer, and this is when Diaz suspects and even confronts his new friend about whether he is actually a spy. Based on the simply bizarre things Silverstein had done throughout the film in order to save his friend and bring down the corrupt Solares, it seems very likely that the psychologist is actually a spy. In fact, his wife had also had the same doubt earlier in the film. But in the end, Silverstein reveals that he is not a spy, although he does intend to join the international security agency now, meaning that we might get to see him and Diaz team up once again in a possible sequel to A Time for Bravery.
