Escobar: Paradise Lost (2014)

Escobar: Paradise Lost arrives with a title that promises a druglord and a runtime that mostly delivers a sunburned Canadian. Josh Hutcherson plays Nick, a surfer who follows his brother to Colombia, falls for Maria, and discovers that her uncle runs the Medellin cartel. The romance occupies the first hour. The dread occupies the second. Benicio del Toro sits in the middle of it, glowering with the patience of a man who has already decided how this ends.

On the cultural ledger, the film is a sparse entry. The cast is Latin American across the board, which is the ordinary consequence of setting a narco drama in Colombia, not a statement of intent. Maria is a romantic object whose narrative function is to be loved and then mourned. She is given little else to do, and the film does not appear troubled by this. The drug trade here is violent criminal enterprise, presented without commentary on wealth, race, or systems. No sermon, no cause, no messaging to speak of. A young man cannot bring himself to shoot a fifteen-year-old guide, and that is the entire moral architecture.

The remainder is a competent genre exercise from 2014, a year when such exercises were not yet expected to carry ideological freight. Del Toro looms. The middle sags. The reviews were mixed and the box office was modest. For our purposes the film registers as close to inert, a vintage that offers almost nothing to the sommelier and asks only to be watched.