Escobar’s menacing charm steals the show
LOS ANGELES — Into a cultural moment already roiling with political theatre, border issues and gun violence drops Narcos, a new series from Netflix that chronicles the rise of Pablo Escobar, whose ruthless monomania was matched only by his enduring antihero popularity.
Two decades after being shot by the Colombian National Police, the man who fuelled cocaine use in the U.S. and founded the Medellin cartel, who had officials and agents assassinated and thousands of Colombians slaughtered, remains larger than life, the subject of countless articles, books and films. In Medellin, tourists go on guided Pablo tours.
That addictive combination of brutality, enormous wealth and personal charisma, which fuels so many careers and genres of fiction, is precisely what creators Chris Brancato, Eric Newman and Carlo Bernard and director Jose Padilha attempt to explore with Narcos, which began streaming Friday. It’s a grand if inconsistent experiment that, from the moment it opens with a definition of magic realism, wears its considerable ambitions on its sleeve.
“There’s a reason magic realism was invented in Colombia,” we are told by DEA Agent Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook), as if to prepare us for evocations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende. Instead, we get a gangster tale supersized by sheer volume (So much coke! So much money! So much violence!), sprinkled with ideology (communism, militarism, liberation theology) and loosely wrapped in nostalgia for the ’80s and America’s war on drugs.
Taking full advantage of Netflix’s signature freedom from traditional narrative convention, the writers and director combine the historical footage of a docudrama with the subtitled Spanish of an art film, the viciousness of premium cable with the easy-read political analysis of a best-seller.
Not surprisingly, the batter is often lumpy and the flavours clash as often as they complement. Yes, there is humour to be found in a man, played to great effect by Brazilian Wagner Moura, who made so much money he had to hide some in his Mama’s sofa, but the rise of the Medellin cartel was not some pop cultural moment like the reign of the Beatles. Though the era’s brutality is shown, Narcos’ attempt to grapple with the power of the mythology often means simply surrendering to it.
The tone of the narration does not help. Narcos tells its story through Murphy, a young agent who signs up for the war on drugs the way his father signed up for the Second World War.
In homage to Goodfellas, much of the first hour is devoted to explaining how all this is gonna work. In breezily jaded tones, Murphy dumps us into the middle of the war zone, then pulls us out for a brief cocaine tutorial. Out of the violent Chilean jungle crawls a man with a magical paste. Rejecting two of three smugglers, he picks Escobar, a crook of such menacing charm that even Murphy can’t keep the admiration out of his voice as he quickly describes the lowly smuggler’s transformation to billionaire drug lord.