Do you have a video playback issues?
Please disable AdBlocker in your browser for our website.
Due to a high volume of active users and service overload, we had to decrease the quality of video streaming. Premium users remains with the highest video quality available. Sorry for the inconvinience it may cause. Donate to keep project running.
When young surfer Nick (Josh Hutcherson) falls for the niece of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (Benicio Del Toro), he finds his life on the line after being pulled into the dangerous world of the Escobar family business.
When you have the fortune of landing an actor like Del Toro, it's almost criminal to spend so much time watching the scales fall from an innocent's eyes when we could be watching a master actor convey quiet, sleepy-eyed, mumbling menace.
The movie contains a subtly crazed performance from Benicio del Toro as Escobar: one moment fooling around with his children in the hacienda swimming pool, fondling his gold taps, the next executing his enemies.
Hutcherson, who's best known for being overshadowed by Jennifer Lawrence in the Hunger Games series, is equally dominated here. But that suits the unequal relationship of guileless Nick and calculating Pablo.
The fact that the filmmakers felt the need to manufacture a Canadian surfer character to be the 'mainstream' moviegoer's likable, trustworthy guide through Escobar-land is a revealing and presumptuous demonstration of racial/cultural myopia.
Nick might usurp most of the screen time, but it's Mr. Del Toro, face flickering from benevolent to vicious and body heaving with literal and symbolic weight, who seizes the film.
There are few actors that commit to their roles as much as Benecio Del Toro... as he demonstrates quite spectacularly at times as one of the most infamous drug-lords of the past century in Escobar: Paradise Lost.