Escobar: Paradise Lost
Surf and turf wars...
It’s a brave filmmaker who tackles the story of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, after Entourage hero Vincent Chase’s notorious disaster Medellin. Actor-turned-director Andrea Di Stefano makes a decent attempt, yet despite a compelling performance by Benicio Del Toro as the notorious kingpin, it falls short of capturing Escobar’s true complexity.
In truth, Pablo isn’t the focus of this fictional version of events. Instead, the hero is Canadian surfer Nick (Josh Hutcherson), whose idyllic lifestyle on the beach gets even better – he thinks – when he falls in love with local charity worker Maria (Claudia Traisac). The catch: Pablo is her uncle, and soon paradise seems a long way away.
In its broadest details, this ticks the boxes surrounding Escobar’s duality: treated like a folk hero by Colombia’s poor and yet indiscriminately butchering opponents and bribing his way into power. Del Toro is well cast; his mercurial shifts between sentimental bonhomie and narrowed-eyed paranoia are suitably unsettling. Viewed at one remove, however, the character is shorn of specificity: just another gangster on the make. Comparison with The Last King Of Scotland – the most obvious model here – reveals how poorly integrated the history is with the fiction, and Del Toro never has the material to create a career-defining performance.
That said, the fictional elements build up steam nicely, as Escobar enlists Nick in a mission to hide his ill-gotten gains while the drug lord heads to a pre-arranged (and real-life) prison holiday. The slow first half gives way to a well-staged, tense thriller full of betrayal and bloodshed. Hutcherson channels his Hunger Games persona as an uncomfortable killer and the film, finally, provides a memorably savage snapshot of what the Medellin cartel was capable of. It’s just a shame that Escobar: Paradise Lost never quite escapes its central flaw: is it even vaguely plausible that Nick would be naïve enough to get so close to such a worldfamous bogeyman? Simon Kinnear THE VERDICT As a thriller, it’s exciting enough. Yet director Andrea Di Stefano all but ignores the opportunity to deliver a definitive, Carlos- style take on one of modern crime’s central figures. › Certificate 15 Director Andrea Di Stefano Starring Josh Hutcherson, Benicio Del Toro, Brady Corbet, Claudia Traisac Screenplay Andrea Di Stefano Distributor Munro Film Services Running time 120 mins