Loving Pablo

But for all its missteps, it's tough not to be engaged. Cruz's full-tilt flamboyance is just too much fun, and her more down-to-earth moments can be devastating.

Cruz is stunning in Vallejo’s exquisite couture ensembles and impeccable makeup. But like the film itself, they are just on the surface.

Loving Pablo had the opportunity of making Virginia Vallejo its star. It should have pushed Escobar to the background so Bardem could shine as a villain-in-waiting instead being gifted the spotlight.

Like flipping through the pages of a pulpy best-seller, watching Loving Pablo has its moments of guilty pleasure but leaves an empty feeling when you reach the end.

Double-stuffed with kill squads, killer ’80s couture and mood-killing howlers, Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s Loving Pablo is more a greatest hits than a story, the kind of radically compressed life-of-a-legend movie where everything happens in a giddy, ridiculous gush — except for when it slows down to dwell on horrors.

Long, loud and lurid, with a distinct whiff of week-old quesito colombiano, Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s pulpy Pablo Escobar biopic promises an alternative spin on familiar material by taking the perspective of the drug kingpin’s glamorous journalist lover Virginia Vallejo. Yet she turns out to be as stock a presence as anyone else in this blood-spattered chunk of cartoon history.

Why is she attracted to him? For that matter, why are we watching?