Carlos

This three part film with a runtime of just under six hours chronicles the life of Carlos the Jackal, a terrorist currently serving a life term in a french prison. He's best known for a 1975 raid on an OPEC meeting in vienna and having a sweet nickname. So sitting through a film that was actually as long as Valentines Day felt (the Ashton Kutcher vehicle, not the day) the obvious question is whether or not Carlos is a compelling enough character to devote so much time to. Before I answer that let me briefly segue into what the film does well. Edgar Ramirez is a compelling presence as the titular character, and the film goes to great pains not to romanticise his life, which thankfully means little in the way of super stylish montages and very short, messy and matter matter of fact violence. This approach, and the runtime, also means that it captures how dreary the life of a terrorist must actually be - constantly moving, having most of your efforts fail , all the while knowing that some day its all going to end badly.

This is also means that you are sitting through six hours of what is often very mundane action. That wouldn't be a debilitating if we were invested in the character but that's not really the case here. As he's portrayed in the film, Carlos is a man of shifting ideology (going from fighting for Palestinian freedom, to Marxism, to finally Islamic revolution), ready to jump on whatever horse will have him. This amorphous personality meant I never really get any sense as to why he cares so much about committing terrorist acts, and since most of his speeches are just just sound like typical 'revolutionary' cliches there's no way to tell what beliefs he really has. As a reult, I never ended really caring what happened to him, and therefore its difficult to say that this subject deserved such a thorough examination. Not that its boring, its too skillfully made for that, but its just too often feels like a slog to wholly recommend.

However none of this was the film's biggest problem. No that would be the subtitles. The white they were projected in instantly became unreadable whenever they were against a white (or simply bright) background, and since the film often uses black and white news footage, and had lots of scenes in the desert, this got really annoying. Really that's the biggest reason not to see it. Well that and that the film felt the constant need to show a fully nude Carlos in an effort to show how he gets fatter, softer, and hairier over time. Sexy.