Untitled Document

I knew very little of Che Guevara before I saw the first part of Steven Soderbergh's documentary-like take on the man, and now that I've seen it there is one one thing I know for absolute certain: there's absolutely no way in the world I'll be watching part 2.

I think someone is going to have to explain to me why Che Guevara has captured people's imaginations so much that they walk around wearing Che-Guevara merchandise. What was so great about that man? Why is he someone to celebrate? People would argue he was a revolutionary, that he fought against oppression, helped the oppressed the poor and the weak. But he was also a murderer which, one would think, trumps any of the good things he fought for. Even this very pro-Che take from Soderbergh confirms a few sobering facts including his indiscriminate attitude towards murdering people and his propensity to blindly follow Castro's orders without taking a second to think about the morality of them. Yes the man has a gravitas - one neatly captured by Beniciio Del Toro who is at his best in the black and white shot New York based scenes in which Che preps for an interview on American TV and addresses the UN assembly. But Hitler had gravitas. Castro had gravitas. Pol Pot and Saddam Hussain both have had gravitas. But walking around with their images emblazoned on your t-shirt might provoke a few funny looks. But not so with Che, and that intrigues me. Do people who wear his face on their clothing even know anything about the guy or do they think wearing it is cool because Che was a rebel and rebels are cool?

Any film is only as good as its source material and in Che Guevara you undoubtedly have enough source material for two films. Trouble is, if this first one is anything to go by - and it's a fair bet that it is - these two films are excruciatingly dull. Rarely have I seen anything quite so self-indulgent. Soderbergh is clearly quite taken with Guevara but fails utterly to convey why the man should be worthy of 4+ hours of our time. Long stretches of this film see Che engage in completely trivial conversation. Lifeless action sequences serve little purpose other than to punctuate the interminable stretches of dialogue with something slightly more interesting, except that they're simple not very interesting at all. Every now and again Che will come out with some patronising state-the-obvious nugget of philosophical redundancy that just makes the self-aggrandising film irritate even more.

I walked out as the clock approached the two hour mark, having decided that I wasn't even half way through and I could be doing better things with my life that watching this pompous 4 hour slogfest. Credit to Del Toro - he did nothing wrong and, as is usually the case with Soderbergh, it looks good, but the script is what makes or breaks a film like this and this is sycophantic film-making at its worst.