Cocaine Cowboys

Traveling faster than a fat line of blow snorted from mirror to nose, Cocaine Cowboys is all rush and no crash.

Although the movie doesn't exactly romanticize the period, the film still generates a twinge of pride in viewers who lived in South Florida during that time -- and lived to tell about it.

An exhaustive, exciting and ultimately exhausting history of how that white powder, and the Colombian crime lords who imported it by the hundreds of kilos, transformed the culture and economy of Miami, for good and for ill.

Cocaine is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it spurts, it spray-paints.

This is an ugly film, but with an undeniable allure.

Cocaine Cowboys would be a great one-hour television piece. Unfortunately, it's a two-hour long documentary that recalls, in scrupulous, unnecessary detail, the rise and fall of Miami's role as the cocaine capital of America.

There are a couple of grams of interesting stories about Miami's drug traffic in Cocaine Cowboys, but the good stuff is cut with 50 kilos of cinematic baking soda.