DVD Reviews

Che Part I

• Rating:
• Director: Steven Soderbergh
• Starring: Benicio Del Toro
• Details: France/Spain/US / 126mins (15A).

Steven Soderbergh's ambitious attempt to bring the life of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara to the screen is both a success and a failure, but one of its major successes is that the film is split up into two parts (Part I sees the revolution in Cuba while Part II takes in the Bolivian exhibition that ended with his death in 1967) as 4 hours and 13 minutes would be tough on anyone's backside. Part I kicks off in 1955 with Che (Del Toro) meeting Fidel Castro (Bechir) in an apartment in Mexico City where the fledgling plans to overthrow Batista's US-favoured regime for a socialist paradise are put in place. Soderbergh then skips forward to 1964 and Che's trip to the US, where he is now a celebrity. The rest of the film follows in this vein, cutting back and forth from the revolution and the run up to his speech to the UN.

In Part I, Soderbergh touches on all aspects of the man's persona: the thinker, the doctor, the man of the people (Che asks and remembers the names of everyone he comes across) and the warrior. It's important for the director to explore all these facets, but none are fleshed out and this results in a character derived from history books rather than heart - something the recent Baadar Meinhoff Complex suffered from. Soderbergh is also shown up as a director who isn't comfortable with the action sequence; his fight scenes are flat and lack the pizzazz of a war film - no one was expecting Platoon, but still. Soderbergh's biggest mistake, however, is making the assumption that anyone watching knows a lot about the man and has seen and loved The Motorcycle Diaries; Che's past is hardly mentioned and what Soderbergh is hoping is that the audience is already onside because of Gael Garcia Bernal's brilliant performance. Del Toro's Che differs from Bernal's; gone is the wide-eyed youth in favour of a quietly confident man who knows what he wants and what the world needs. Del Toro is commanding in what is a difficult role, a soldier who has been elevated to a Christ-like figure by that poster that adorns many a student wall. Sometimes interesting but sometimes dull, one can only hope that Part II will settle down and delve deeper into the mind of this fascinating man...

Review by Gavin Burke