The only thing that interests me about this is its historical dimension–I really couldn’t care less about the “human drama” that motivated Pablo Escobar. That’s not why I’m watching this. For this reason, I actually appreciate the narrative voices-overs, because that’s how the historical perspective is mostly being injected. If you’re looking for another Sopranos, you’re looking in the wrong place.
In fact, what I mostly like is just seeing something shot in Colombia–seeing regular everyday things and places from Colombian life, though they are rather limited even here. It’s rare that we see the real Colombia in the U.S. media. Almost everything that we get is filtered through the self-centered perspective of our own drug consumption. One time I went to a movie theater in Barranquilla that had two or three screenings, and we ended up unknowingly in the wrong one. (I think it was Natural Born Killers, or something like that, and we wanted to see Schindler’s List.) When the movie opened, the establishing shot was gratuitously set in Colombia, (as a place where–of course–criminal things naturally originate), and when the location title came up, the whole theater just collectively groaned in disgust, as if to say, “Here we go again.”