Saint Pauly

5/10

Spoilers

This sort of film gives films a bad name. Netflix told the story first and told it better. It's almost as if the producers said, "Hey, look at this Netflix series. We can do **far** worse than this!" [spoiler] _Loving Pablo_ opens with Columbian journalist Virginia Vallejo (Penélope Cruz) laughing upon learning it's illegal for American hotels to give guests aspirin. She adds, "Pablo (Escobar) would laugh, too. And then he would kill you." WTF!? Why would he kill me? Because American hotels can't give aspirin, because of the irony of drug problem in the U.S., or because he's laughing? Sadly, this kind of lazy writing spreads to all areas of the film. [/spoiler] [spoiler] Inside the first 3 minutes of the Loving Pablo (the title sounds like it's a romantic memoir by one of Picasso's wives) we have this ridiculous intro, are shown Pablo Escobar's (Javier Bardem) terrible prosthetic stomach (it honestly looks as though they took a prosthetic pregnancy bump and painted hair on it), and discover that Pablo Escobar, his Columbian wife, a famous Columbian journalist, the Columbian Minister of justice, the Columbian Senate...are all going to speak **English** throughout the entire film. [/spoiler] I repeat: WTF!? Add to these problems a script that is, at its absolute best, unremarkable but is frequently so clunky it hurts your ears, and a habit of showing the aftermath of the action but never the action itself. All of this combined makes me think the film was written and made by a pack of rabid filmmakers who were nose deep in "research" of Escobar's national product, and what we have here is s cautionary tale about how badly a drug addled mind works. Just say, "No", kids.

JPRetana

0/10

A caption at the beginning of Loving Pablo informs us that “This film is inspired by real events. Some of the characters, names, and events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes." What they don't tell us is that even the protagonists’ nationalities and languages have been changed. Colombians Pablo Escobar and Virginia Vallejo are played by Spanish actors speaking English – or, at the very least, trying to; Javier Bardem's English is atrocious and Penelope Cruz's is abominable, and their Colombian accents are just as bad, if not worse. To confuse things further, the characters occasionally say some random words or phrases in Spanish. Now, I don't think it's asking too much of the audience to pretend that the characters are speaking Spanish among themselves even as the actors deliver their lines in English; after all Hemingway did something similar in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But if the characters are supposed to be speaking in their native language, shouldn’t they sound like native speakers? Also, the dialogue should be consistent; i.e., all English all the time – because otherwise, what language are they supposed to be speaking when they say something in Spanish? This is a Spanish film, about Spanish-speaking characters, written, produced and directed by Spaniards; why they felt the need to tell their story in any other language than that of Cervantes, I haven’t the foggiest. Except, of course, for the obvious reason of appealing to the Anglo-Saxon market, but in this case why go to the trouble of getting Spanish – especially big names like Bardem and Cruz – and Colombians actors, only to force them to recite most of their dialogue in English? If nothing else, they could have at least had the decency not to have Cruz narrate the movie.