There
must some kind of competition between the high-profile
Spanish-speaking actors who will serve as the best Pablo Escobar ever
featured on either big or small screen. And after Édgar Ramirez
(Killing Pablo), Benicio del Toro (very good in
Escobar: Paradise Lost, even though the film itself was a kind
of bland experience) and a brief episode by Mauricio Mejía in
last year’s American Made, the turn came to Javier Bardem
to put on his fake belly / fatsuit and his mask and to try his luck
as the notorious drug kingpin in Fernando Léon de Aranoa’s
Spanish-Bulgarian co-production Loving Pablo. Maybe somebody
should tell the whole crew behind this silly challenge that the goal
has been already set pretty high by the Brazilian actor Wagner
Moura of the Netflix TV series Narcos.
For
his angle to this well-documented, told and re-told story, de Aranoa
chose the best-selling memoir Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar by
the drug lord’s former associate and lover, celebrated TV
journalist Virginia Vallejo which he adapted himself.
Generally speaking, de Aranoa is a reliable scriptwriter and even
more reliable director of Mondays in the Sun fame, but after
interestingly drafted, though cliché-ridden feature A Perfect Day
and “on the right place at the right time” documentary Politics,
Instructions Manual, Loving Pablo makes him look
amateurish like a bottom of the class college boy trying to emulate
the ultimate crime-drama bio-pic classics in the likes of Goodfellas.
Long story short, everything he could do wrong – he did with
vengeance.
His
writing is lazy, relying to much on the source material and therefore
clumsily patched with the god-awful voice-over narration done by
Penélope Cruz who is also present as the semi-active
co-leading character Virginia. The end result is that the voice-over
is overlapping with the visual narration which would look better and
more elegant without explaining the obvious. Even the structure is
kinda pedestrian, lacking any kind of personal or political angle and
simply lining up the biographical events in a chronological order.
When he finally distances himself from the book, he does so in an
atrocious fashion completed with borderline moronic dialogue and even
more idiotic monologue.
The
musical choices which were aimed to channel the scorsesian style of
sorts are also lazy, reduced to often-heard 80’s cheesy pop, Latino
and rock standards, with Carlos Santana’s Black Magic
Woman (as the pillar of Latin rock) used completely out of
context somewhere around the half an hour mark. The only interesting
and humorous piece of soundtrack is the Christmas standard Let It
Snow in the scene when the cartel’s transport jet lands on an
American highway, but even this is too much on the nose (pun
intended).
Also,
the attempted use of torture and shock does not do any good for the
film because it usually ends with some half-hearted brutality and
over the top animal cruelty with a “top-down” approach in which a
horse gets killed in the beginning, a dog gets beaten in an elaborate
human torturing scene around mid-point and a flock of pigeons flies
into the helicopter propeller near the end. And let us not speak
about ripping off de Palma’s Scarface’s signature
chainsaw scene.
Let
us maybe speak about the use of the language(s) here. Filming mostly
in English might seem as a reasonable, business-friendly solution,
but with a heavy (as in totally fake) Spanish accent it just sounds
ridiculous, especially underlined with Spanish curses and phrases
known to every owner of a TV set. Unfortunately, that puts the
central pair of actors between the rock and the hard place. They have
some chemistry in the scenes they share (which is understandable
given that they are a real-life couple), but their cartoonish
accents, his constant mumbling and her occasional telenovella styled
hysterical over-acting just remind us how both of them are not really
on the top of their game when acting in English, like one The
Counsellor or Vanilla Sky was not enough already. Finding
the counter-argument might prove futile: Bardem’s performance in No
Country for Old Men was wordless and the interaction between two
of them in Vicky Christina Barcelona was mostly in Spanish
which suits both of them better.
Speaking
of acting, not that the rest of the crew fared better, with both
Spanish or English dialogue, like Peter Sarsgaard as a DEA
agent or Julieth Restrepo as Escobar’s slightly less
glamourous wife Maria Victoria Henao, but that again is a strong case
of seriously under-developed characters due to the lazy writing.
We
might compare Loving Pablo to a car crash, but that would not
be accurate. Trainwreck would be more adequate comparison, but still
would not describe it completely. No, what comes to my mind is a
mid-air collision over a densely populated area: leave any hope to be
a survivor of this one.
