I’ve been a fan of Saul Bass since before I even knew who he was. I picked up Ciudad because the cover reminded me of his work from the late 50s into the early 60s. I didn’t even read the synopsis until right before I started reading the story. Even if I didn’t enjoy the story, the cover is enough to make me feel like getting it wasn’t a waste.
Ciudad is about a girl who gets kidnapped and taken to the one-stop corruption shop Ciudad del Este and the man who rescues her. The synopsis mentioned that it contained hyper violence and that made me a little hesitant because sometimes the action can get in the way of the story. Thankfully, it didn’t.
The story starts out with Eva already kidnapped and Tyler already in the process of rescuing her. With this being the whole first chapter and so early in the story. I wondered what the remaining four chapters could be filled with. Well, they were full of phase two of the escape and it was worth just about every page. Talk about the odds being against you. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and betrayed at every turn. Tyler wasn’t used to spending so much time with the target and after doing his job for so long he gotten used to treating everything like a job. However, Eva rattled something inside of him and before the job was over, he realized he cared. He cared about her and about himself and it was no longer just a job.
It sounds kind of cliche, but it was well done. I was all for it until he kissed her, though. I guess the writers though it was romantic, though not strictly in the love sense of the word, but it wasn’t. It was actually inappropriate. Eva was in high school when he rescued her, so wrong, wrong, wrong. Fortunately it stopped there and is somewhat forgettable in the grand scheme of things, so I won’t hold it against the story to much.
It was a thrilling ride and there was a lot of violence, but I don’t think any of it was gratuitous. I think the cover represents the feeling of the story well, because now I’m in the mood for something like Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (one of my favorites) for which Saul Bass did the title sequence for.