Critic Reviews

It’s an impressive debut, an ambitious project pulled off with confidence.

Di Stefano's memorable debut feature makes up for its lack of sophistication with constant forward motion.

"Escobar” offers an odd mix of action movie, romantic melodrama and cautionary traveler’s tale, which works better than it should thanks to Del Toro’s fascinating performance and Di Stefano’s assured, muscular helming.

Meanwhile, everyone in the theatre is thinking: Given that I paid good money to learn about the world’s most frightening cocaine king, why am I watching a movie about the world’s most stupid Canadian?

Escobar: Paradise Lost plays more like Greek tragedy than the kind of drug-war tale we’d get in a broader, bigger film, and that is no small part of the many reasons it works.

When the plot circles back to those opening moments, the movie finds a momentum that ends spectacularly. And again: Benicio Del Toro is playing Pablo Escobar. What more do you need?

Escobar: Paradise Lost employs this structure in a way that divides the movie neatly in half: one hour of tedious expository flashback followed by one hour of solidly exciting present-tense thriller action.

After a predictable opening hour, Paradise Lost manages to deliver a surprise or two as it switches gears into a full-on thriller. But it never gets close to the epic heights to which it aspires.

Nick might usurp most of the screen time, but it’s Mr. Del Toro, face flickering from benevolent to vicious and body heaving with literal and symbolic weight, who seizes the film.

Any insight into Escobar’s relationship with the people of his country is sacrificed in the trade-off — Nick sees him as a charismatic Robin Hood who showers the poor in blood money that’s still dripping wet, but the film forgets the complexity of Escobar’s politics as soon as Nick realizes that he needs to escape. If only Paradise Lost gave us a better sense of what he was leaving behind.