You Say You Want a Revolution? Well Unfortunately, the much-hyped Che biopic is not it.
-By Joshua Rothkopf
Che
Benicio Del Toro, Benjamin Bratt, Franka Potente
Remember when Del Toro could really light a fire under a movie’s ass? Sure, it’s been a while since he stole 1995’s The Usual Suspects (and mystified English-as-first-languagers) with his mumbling, unhinged Fenster, or won his 2001 Oscar for Traffic. But Del Toro is a keeper, from the olds chool Bogie/Mitchum mold. That’s a lot to live up to—he better get started soon. So it comes with deep regret—an “Ah, fuck!” level bummer—that Che, Del Toro’s most substantial role to date, arrives stillborn. On paper, the match is perfect: Who better to play the Argentine intellectual-turned-revolutionary than the galvanizing Del Toro, an actor who doesn’t have to “play” smart to be smart? And who better to direct Del Toro than his Traffic comrade Steven Soderbergh? Alas, the four-hour plus epic is uninterested in delivering much at all of Che’s verve, his radicalization, or his subsequent doubts. Del Toro rarely gets to turn on his charm. Instead, someone thought it was a good idea to make a $60 million picture about battle tactics: jungle skirmish after bloody jungle skirmish. Granted, revolutions are fought on the ground. But they’re also fought in the mind, and to reduce as inspiring a figure as Guevara to a mere battalion leader shows a lack of political seriousness. Che is a resolutely dispassionate movie—the last thing you would say about its ostensible subject. It’s as if that famously oversold Che T-shirt has been replaced by a beige smock.
