3/5 duos of alpha and beta males
  by Jeffery Mingo (Homewood, IL USA)
This movie makes you see life through the eyes of wrongdoers. The main characters steal car parts and sell them. If you couldn't sympathize with the substance lovers in "Basketball Diaries" or the bank robbers in "Set It Off," then it will be hard to embrace this.
Like Goldblum's "The Fly," this film gets better as you keep watching it. My rating of it kept going up as I moved closer to the end. If you are bored in the first minutes, keep watching as it gets exciting.
Do you remember when Frida told Diego in "Frida," "If you lie down with dogs!"? Well, this film speaks about what goes around comes around. Those who dish out bad karma also receive it. If you like villains to get their comeuppance, then you will enjoy this.
Many activists have complained that Latin American TV and film disproportionately shows people of European phenotype. That media shamelessly keeps the brown or black faces at a minimal and to the margins. Well, in this film, the two main characters clearly have indigenous ancestry, but everyone else could pass for Caucasian. I wonder what this film is trying to convey when its teenagers are brown, but all of the adults filmed are white.
The title, "Used Parts," is fitting. The main characters steal parts from cars but they are also used parts in their own worlds. They are needed, but not self-sufficient. Do you remember in "Once When We Were Colored" an ice company didn't want to hire a type of person but insisted that his community continue to buy its products? Well, an uncle learns the hard way that he cannot survive without his nephew.
In some ways this was just a Mexican "New Jersey Drive." However, both films have their own separate mertis. This film really began to grow on me.