Some films announce themselves in the title. A centaur is a creature with no seam between rider and mount, and that is a fair description of Rafa, played by Àlex Monner: a man who is only fully himself when he and whatever he is riding at speed stop being two separate things. Daniel Calparsoro directed this Spanish thriller for Netflix, which released it in June 2022. It is a remake of Yann Gozlan’s French film Burn Out (2017). The premise fits in a sentence. Rafa is hooked on the pure, fiery feeling that speed racing gives him, and when the mother of his child gets mixed up with drug dealers, he burns rubber to get her out.

That sentence is also, more or less, the whole plot. It is worth saying so early, because everything Centauro does well and badly follows from it. A story this compact leaves no room for detours. It has to run like a machine, with each scene pushing Rafa closer to the moment when his one talent becomes his only weapon. When it works, it works the way a good chase works: you stop analysing and start leaning forward in your seat. When it doesn’t, you notice how few ideas are holding the thing up.

Start with what is good. The notion that a man’s vice and his usefulness might be the same thing is a sound engine for a thriller. Rafa’s appetite for speed is not a hobby the script sets politely aside once the danger arrives. It is the very skill the danger demands. That gives the film a pleasing logic. The trait that has made him unreliable, the one a partner and a child would reasonably want him to give up, is exactly what makes him the person who can help. Calparsoro seems to know this irony is his best card, and he plays it without belabouring it. It is not a profound observation. It is a tidy one, and tidy counts for a lot when you have eighty-nine minutes.

Those eighty-nine minutes, by IMDb’s listing of 1h29m, are the second strength. Centauro doesn’t linger. It sets out its people, tightens the screws and moves on, and anyone who has sat through a two-and-a-half-hour streaming thriller will feel the relief. Mikel Zorrilla, writing for Espinof, called it trepidante, and the word fits the pace, even if the pace is also the source of the film’s trouble. Rock and Films headlined its own review ‘Ruedas en vez de patas’, wheels instead of legs, a neat way of saying that the mythical creature of the title has been handed an engine. Both headlines treat the film as something to be felt in motion rather than argued over, and I think that is the right way to approach it.

Now the trouble. Speed is a wonderful subject for a camera and a poor one for characterisation. The film wants us to care about Rafa’s fear of losing Natalia and the child, and Monner is capable enough to suggest the weight of it, but the script gives him little to play beyond urgency. We learn what Rafa craves and what he must do. We learn far less about who he is when he is standing still. The same goes, with more injustice, for Begoña Vargas as Natalia. Hers is the thankless job: the plot needs her endangered, and the story is told from the side of the man who will come for her. Vargas has real presence, and you sense the film would have been richer had it let Natalia act on her situation instead of only suffering it.

There is a theme here, and the film half-knows it. Rafa is a father, or at least the father of a child, and the story quietly sets that responsibility against his addiction. Is the man who cannot stop chasing a feeling capable of staying put for the people who depend on him? It is a decent question. Centauro raises it mostly through its premise and rarely stops to look at it, which is a shame, because a few quiet scenes asking it directly would have cost little of the film’s momentum and bought it a good deal of weight. As it stands, the question hovers behind the action and never quite steps forward.

The drug dealers are the weakest element. A thriller of this kind runs on its threat, and the threat here feels sketched rather than built. Carlos Bardem, as Boro, is a strong piece of casting on paper, an actor with an imposing screen manner who can make a handful of lines carry menace. Around him stand Édgar Vittorino as Carlos, Abraham Pérez Fernández as Mateo, Sebastian Ciontescu as Jairo, Anderson Brian González Montoya as Tico, Dollar Selmouni as Cortés, Big Lois as Valderrama and Patricia Vico as Regina Costas. That is a long list of names for a film this brisk, and most of them register as functions rather than people: the one who threatens, the one who obeys, the one who watches. This is not the actors’ fault. A running time under an hour and a half cannot give everyone a personality, and the film picks speed over texture every time it has to choose.

Carlos Jean wrote the score, and ‘Centauro’s Theme 1’ is on the soundtrack release. The job of the music in a film like this is double: keep the pulse up once the racing starts, and stop the quieter scenes from going slack. It does the first more convincingly than the second. That is a common fate for scores in thrillers that are built around motion, and I would not hold it against Jean so much as against a film that gives its calm moments so little to say.

Remakes invite an awkward question: why? Burn Out already exists. The practical answer is probably that a compact genre story travels easily from one language to another, and I don’t mind that. A man, the mother of his child and a criminal threat is a setup that needs no translation. But a remake also owes something of its own, and Centauro, as far as I can tell from the facts of its premise, is content to follow the earlier film’s outline. If it has a local accent, that comes from the cast and the language rather than from any fresh idea about the story. It is a competent copy, and I mean both words.

It is also a Netflix film, and you can feel what that means: a brisk running time, clear stakes, a premise you can grasp from the thumbnail. IMDb viewers rate it 5.4 out of 10, and one of them calls it an entertaining movie to put on in the background. That is a backhanded compliment, but I don’t think it is unfair. Something you can half-watch is not necessarily a lesser product. It does mean the film seldom asks you to look closely, and when it does, as in the stretches where Natalia’s danger should hurt, it has not always earned the attention it asks for.

So who is it for? Anyone who wants a quick, muscular thriller with a simple engine and a hero whose flaw is also his gift will find an evening’s worth of entertainment here. Those who come looking for rounded villains, a distinctive point of view on the story it borrowed, or a serious look at what addiction does to a family will leave hungry. Monner gives it a body and a pulse, Vargas deserves more to do, and Calparsoro keeps things moving. Centauro is not memorable, but it is not meant to be, and for eighty-nine minutes it keeps its foot down.