The Two Escobars

This is a fascinating, if a little scattershot, documentary about the infamous Pablo Escobar and the almost-as-infamous killing of a Colombia soccer player. The film mostly deftly balances the drug and violence problem in Colombia that coincided with (and funded!) the Golden Age of Colombian Football. The only real problem I have with the film is it’s rather naive acceptance of the US position on Colombia, as if Colombia and its drug cartels were the source of this problem, not, you know, demand in the United States. I understand that this film isn’t about that issue, but a slightly more nuanced approach to the American side of things would have made this already ambiguous film – a film that manages to help us understand why some people in Colombia didn’t hate the drug cartels, or at least some of them – even more ambiguous, as life is.