‘Escobar’ is close, but no Corleone
Written by Megan Balser
Photo courtesy of Creative Commons
“Escobar: Paradise Lost” tries to combine “The Godfather” and “The Fugitive,” but doesn’t quite fill their enormous shoes. It juggles a melting pot of chessmaster vs. everyman tropes, and while the film was a nail-biting ride from start to finish, it failed to realize that a derivative movie has to be more than the sum of its parts to stand alone.
The film follows Nick, a young Canadian played by Josh Hutcherson, and his relationship with affable Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, a real-life figure – Nick’s girlfriend is his niece – played by Benicio Del Toro. There’s a love story in there somewhere, too, but the significant dynamic is between the two men.
Escobar is the backbone of this movie, and Del Toro’s gravitas and charm steals every scene he’s in. Picture a warmer, smilier Vito Corleone with Gus Fring’s savvy at balancing drug empires and a good publicity. Throw in the charismatic brutality of Quentin Tarantino’s Bill and you’ve got Pablo Escobar.
The powerful personality of Escobar haunts this movie. From the start Del Toro paints his character portrait with small, deliberate details: this man prays with his mother over the phone, then hands his twenty-something nephew-in-law a gun with orders to kill as though sending him to the grocery store. He reads “The Jungle Book” to his kids in a pink playhouse while ordering the slaughter of people who trust him. Del Toro makes it painfully obvious: Escobar is a nice man, but he’s not a good one.
The audience is just as charmed as Nick at first, but we are quicker to realize Escobar’s true character. Nick thinks that being a loving and generous family man and being a ruthlessly cruel crime lord are mutually exclusive. We’ve seen enough of these movies to know better – and while Del Toro’s performance is fantastic, Escobar doesn’t stand out among his cinematic Big Bad peers.
His villainy is too easy and simple. Though Nick is clearly outmatched, we’re never given proof Escobar is actually more intelligent than most people. His plans aren’t elaborate or sneaky. They amount to biding his time, hiding his intentions and showing up with more guns than the other guys. Not much strategy factors in.
Despite Escobar’s intellectual shortcomings, Nick isn’t smart and resourceful enough to make this cat-and-mouse game truly compelling. His appeal is in his innocence, sweetness and ability to cry convincingly. His naiveté never wears off and even his decency gets wearisome at times because there’s no tension to it. He’s simply a nice, compliant guy. If he has a dark side, we don’t see it.
Escobar’s dark side was well established – with the subtlety of a sledgehammer – but the ending tried to put him on a higher pedestal than his actions warranted. He didn’t accomplish anything that any other crime boss wouldn’t or hasn’t done; yet the movie wants us to hear his threat to God as chilling rather than comically arrogant.
Besides a less-than-satisfying ending, “Escobar: Paradise Lost” was a thrilling watch. Only Escobar was a truly memorable character, but he’s so well done he makes up for the others’ shortcomings. The action was there, the moody setting was there and the heart was there – with a character as sensitive as Hutcherson’s, that is guaranteed. This movie brings its otherwise bland protagonist through the basic but timeless arcs of innocence into corruption, complacency into action, submissiveness into vengefulness. Nick’s arc may not move as fast as most action heroes’, but he’s more human than most.
Perhaps we needed someone as simple and innocent as Nick to stand against Escobar’s genre-savvy, cunning immorality. His value isn’t found on his own – he’s frankly unremarkable – but he is a foil that brings out all of Escobar’s best and worst traits.
The smarts may have been lacking in this movie that tried to be grander than it was, but we were only watching for the character dynamics anyway.
