Heroes Wanted (original title Cuerpo de élite) is a 2016 Spanish Comedy film written by Cristóbal Garrido and Adolfo Valor, directed by Joaquín Mazón, and starring María León, Miki Esparbé, and Jordi Sánchez. At the beginning of the film, Spain's elite secret task force, Cuerpo de Élite, is on a mission to find and disarm a bomb with the technical excellent of one of their members, Agente Gil. The mission goes wrong, and all agents are eliminated, so Minister Boyero assembles a task squad out of the finest recruits he can find from the five major ethnic groups of Spain: Santi (Madrid's Mobility Agent), Lola (Andalusia's Civil Guard), Pep (Catalonia's Mosso d'Esquadra), Gorka (Basque Country's Ertzaina) and Byron (an Ecuadorian immigrant who claims he was born in Cuenca, member of Spanish Legion). Their job is to complete the original team's mission, to retrieve the fifth bomb from the Palomares's Broken Arrow incident. Except, it seems that the original mission was betrayed by a mole in their midst, someone else is lurking in the shadows, and the team is less than elite...
Expanded in 2018 with a TV series by the same name.
This film exhibits the following tropes:
- Accidental Aiming Skills: Santi has extremely bad aim. When he has to shoot Minister Boyero to save Lola, he aims for the religious medal she's wearing, knowing that he'll miss and instead hit the Minister.
- ...And That Little Boy Was Me: Played with when, to explain his aversion to shooting, Santi tells a story about a police officer who's forced to take a shot against a criminal holding his son hostage, and misses the shot, shooting the boy. He later explains that he was the boy, shot by his own father, which inspired him to try to become a better police officer than his father was.
- Five-Token Band: Done intentionally. Each member is drawn from one of Spain's ethnic groups.
- Laser Hallway: Santi and Lola face one without noticeable large gaps, although it does have enough space for them to lie flat when it gets reactivated partway through.
- Manly Gay: Gorka is the toughest and most violent member of the group. He's also gay, as revealed midway through the film.
- "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop: Santi and Lola are dropped down the central shaft of the Conaco building in order to infiltrate it. Gorka almost loses hold of their ropes...
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The team consists of a zealous traffic cop, a female officer held down by the glass ceiling, an effete police negotiator, a thuggish agent known for his temper and prominently failing his last mission, and a hyper-nationalist soldier. None of them (except perhaps Lola) are ready for this.
- Self-Destruct Mechanism: Anxton's house has one, disguised as the air conditioning settings. Of course, it gets pushed...
- Smoking Hot Sex: As Byron leaves the elevator after his encounter with the cleaning lady from his village, she's seen sprawled on the floor, smoking a cigarette.
- Springtime for Hitler: Minister Boyero intends for the team to fail so that he can use them to cover up his own theft of the bomb.
