Loving Pablo (2018)
The film chronicles the rise and fall of the world's most feared drug lord Pablo Escobar and his volatile love affair with Colombia's most famous journalist Virginia Vallejo throughout a reign of terror that tore a country apart.
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Sadly I missed a lot of what was said because Javier Bardem just mumbles his way through the whole thing.
What's worse? The drug dealer, or the drug dealer's whore? That's what this is. The story of his most ardent mistress. Are we meant to feel sorry for her? Is she meant to be sympathetic when she was nothing more than a prostitute for the world's biggest drug dealer? She was complicit in what Escobar did. She knew what was going on, yet, her choice was to act as if nothing was wrong. What's worse, the people who do the crime or the ones who willingly profit from it? There's so much wrong with this movie:* It needs subtitles, as someone else pointed out, why have Spanish actors try to speak English and then with accents so thick that you have to listen to the dialog 3-4 times to understand even a single sentence? * Penelope Cruz was not a good choice. She is past the age of doing hot and young. Motherly, sure, but not a hot young thing that she still thinks she is. She just didn't pull it off * If you're going to cast a great actor like Javier Bardem in the role, how about you not ask him to speak in unintelligible English? He's shown that he can speak English very well in other English-focused movies, but apparently the director thought frustrating the audience with really think accents was a good idea. It wasn't.The acting is just bad. The action is just bad. The movie is 2 hours too long.
On it's own this may be a decent movie. But if you watched Narcos before this movie, it only seems like a hasty summary of the series, told from the viewpoint of one of the less interesting characters. This, combined with the fact that it should have been in Spanish, and the annoying voice over, makes it a pain to watch. One upside: Javier Bardem is actually good as Pablo!
Loving Pablo has certainly moments of guilty pleasure but leaves an empty feeling when reaching the end. This is the story of the rise and fall of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. The very clever pairing of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz as the strongly larger-than-life couple gave this production a shot at the international box office before it will go to smaller screens. Very much action-packed, Loving Pablo marks a turn towards the mainstream for Fernando Leon de Aranoa, the Spanish writer-director best known for social and political dramas. What ends up holding the film down to its level of superficial glitz is being adapted from Vallejo's novel/memoir Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar. The story is told almost on that basis and that's the min limit.