Cocaine Cowboys (2006)

Powerful

Memorable, crazy movie

Absolutely Fantastic

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Anyone familiar with the story of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel will know how the mass manufacturing and distribution of cocaine turned Colombia into a war zone, with top politicians and judges routinely assassinated, and gang wars spilling violence onto the streets on a daily basis. Billy Corben's documentary Cocaine Cowboys focuses on the effect the most fashionable drug of the 80s had on Miami, which was the main entry point for masses of imported cocaine. Soon enough, the city once seen as the holiday spot for retired old folks was turned into the richest place in the world, with luxury car dealerships and expensive jewellery shops popping up all over, and of course, lots and lots of banks. The sudden boom was all down to cocaine consumption, and this came with a heavy price.Corben tells the story using a variety of interviews, news reports, archive footage and photographs, lending a voice to everyone from smugglers, enforcers, politicians and law enforcement. The most fascinating insight is given by pilots Jon Roberts and Mickey Munday, who decided to get into the drug trade early on, making an unfathomable fortune in the process. They offer entertaining anecdotes about their experiences, and were making so much money that they lived in little fear of getting caught, even buying their own airports to import the goods in complete secrecy. Roberts and Munday were just regular guys who never dreamed that they could ever become so wealthy, and made sure to enjoy the high-life while it lasted. The main threat came from the cartel itself, which was so powerful and far-reaching that one foot out of line and you were dead, often by way of horrific torture.The film's final third focuses heavily on the 'Cocaine Wars' that became so out-of-hand and brazen that it led to military intervention. This segment is told through the recollections of the deceptively charming inmate Jorge 'Rivi' Ayala, a former hit-man for crime family matriarch Griselda Blanco - known as the 'Godmother' - a woman capable of unspeakable cruelty and brutality. If she didn't like your face, you were a goner, and often entire families, including young children, were wiped out in order to leave no witnesses. It's a mind-blowing tale of how one drug can have such a devastating effect on a country, and it's told in a fast-paced, almost coked-up fashion, with the clever use of subtle animation to make stills feel alive, and a wealth of shocking and revealing archive footage to paint a clear picture of a city in crisis. A 'Reloaded' edition was released in 2014, which adds over 30 minutes of footage and provides updates on some of the subjects. I've seen both, and the original, shorter version tells a much tighter story.

I not only saw the documentary, I lived it, I became a Metro Dade county police officer in Aug of 1980 and retired in 2002, I was on the scene of at least half the drug related killings pictured in the video, and a whole lot more that were not. As if that weren't enough, I also went to High school with the quintessential Cocaine Cowboy Mickey Munday, oddly enough I didn't make the connection till I watched this video 50 something years later, I recall him as a redheaded nerd who the girls wanted nothing to do with, if they had only known that one day he would be buying entire neighborhoods and burying trash bags full of 20s and hundreds.

Right, let me begin by saying that the tagline of this film is wrong. 'The true story that inspired Scarface'. Um...isn't Scarface a remake of a film from the 30s? And wasn't the bulk of Scarface's writing and production already complete by the time this documentary really gets to any story in it's chronological order? If you like watching TV shows in which you're bombarded with endless montages of unsourced and random facts then this is for you. But seriously, I have seen better production values on Channel 5. Calling this TV quality stuff is an insult to TV. The editing is all over the place and it frequently looks like the filmmakers are trying to edit together a sentence that wasn't actually said. If you have seen the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is interviewed on TV by Godfrey Jones then you'll know what I mean.Credit must be given to the crew for actually managing to track down the majority of the drug dealing scum and murderers for honest and open interviews. But with practically no archive footage to work with the film looks incredibly bland. It's also way too long and you'll be looking at your watch by the 80-minute mark.A sequel is in production (oh, lucky us) detailing the life of the Psycho Woman in charge of it all, but you'll excuse me if I have more interesting things to do, like licking the dust from the skirting board behind the radiator.

I wanted to like Cocaine Cowboys a more intriguing documentary than I did. It lacks no influence in terms of its information in the world of big-stakes crime of a period that seems long ago within a thirty-year time frame. I liked hearing details in the stories, like the car towing company the dealers had as their back-up when driving around the cocaine shipments. And the scenes involving- and properly invoking- the years of Noriega and Panama, as well as the small Mafia statistics that carry a lot of weight (no pun intended on the actual boss, more powerful than Escobar) all out of Columbia. And some of the interviews and clips shown are absorbing in their 'been-there-done-that' quality. But there's an oppressive side to how Billy Corben shoots, edits and puts the music to the film. I don't mind in the theory of it how one goes into a cocaine documentary making it a fast-pace story. But it veers more into being in a TV scope- think E! True Hollywood story more than anything- than more traditional documentaries. This may be fine for some wanting a messy rush. However it's repetitive and lacking in any creative flow, not just in how it jumps and pivots through its images of people talking or in what's going on as if it were a theatrical trailer, but to hear the same Scarface-like music over and over behind people talking who shouldn't have music going on in some of their answers. And the one guy who's interviewed most (I forget his name, he's the ex-big time Miami coke dealer with the mustache) adds to the annoyance factor after a while; somehow one might find the guy more interesting in smaller doses, not as the one blabbering and bragging for 45 minutes of the film until it gets to the gun-blazing Columbians.It might be worth a little bit of time if on TV, where it has more of a tabloid edge on things (if whatever edge I can't say for certain). But I'd much rather take on a book two or re-watch Blow or good parts of Scarface or Miami Vice to get a better dramatized take on the facts than see it all the way through again.