Che Part 2

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenwriters: Peter Buchman, Benjamin A. van der Veen
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Franka Potente, Lou Diamond Phillips, Demian Bichir, Rodrigo Santoro
Running Time: 127 mins
Certificate: 15

Steven Soderbergh's exhausting telling of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's rise and fall charts the renowned revolutionary's successful overthrowing of the Batista government in Cuba and his later failed coup in Bolivia. The complete movie runs at a bum-paralysing 257 minutes, so it's no surprise that it's been split into two digestible parts. The endeavour may have been a passion project for Del Toro, but it is Soderbergh who claims ownership of the movie. Perhaps the only A-list Hollywood filmmaker who can legitimately claim to be an auteur, he has director, producer and director of photography credits on Che. At its worst the film risks becoming his epic folly, at its best it's an immersive and unique take on the biopic.

Skipping on several years from Guevara's takeover of Cuba, the action picks up with the doctor-turned-radical arriving in Bolivia incognito hoping to incite another revolution. He still has the fire in his belly but his mind and body have lost their sharpness. Del Toro, almost unrecognisable from Part One with long hair and scraggy beard, plays Guevara as a fading legend. Unsettled by conflict in his own camp, the victim of unwitting sabotage by colleague Tamara (Potente) and stricken with asthma, there's a foreboding certainty that the protagonist won't make it out alive.

With a tad more structure than its predecessor, Che Part 2 is still problematic in that it unfolds at a glacial pace. Though it's at times hypnotic in its lethargy, the episodic structure is not easy to trudge through. Events take place over the course of a year, with Soderbergh exploring a day, cutting to black, then beginning all over again. This stop-start mentality, coupled with the fact that there's little backstory or exploration of what's driving the man whose poster hangs on many a student's bedroom wall, is often frustrating. Soderbergh strives to throw out the established conventions of a biopic and put you right next to Che in battle. He is interested in the man as an icon and not a human being - the film may have benefited from striking a balance between both.

Che's great strength is its authenticity (which it almost loses completely with a bizarre cameo from a bespectacled, Spanish-speaking Matt Damon). Del Toro's performance is a mirror to that in Part One - if that film is Guevara's greatest triumph, then this is his downfall. Towards the end, there's a scene where a captured Che begs a young guard to free him. The guard leaves the room and asks his colleague to take over watching duties, completely deflated that Guevara - the 'celebrity' he has heard so much about - is a complete wreck. Both Del Toro and his young co-star charge that exchange with pathos and emotion.

Che is an uncompromised work from Soderbergh, a filmmaker who manages to retain his experimental sensibility whether he's steering an Ocean's juggernaut or a micro-budgeted indie feature. As one four-hour feature it's too long, and split it still drags and proves enigmatic, but you can't help but admire Che's grounded approach to its remarkable subject.


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