Michael Peña and Diego Luna Shine in the Otherwise Predictable Narcos: Mexico
Photo: Carlos Somonte/Netflix
As I write this, voir dire is underway in the trial of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loero. Some jurors are asking to be excused for the usual reasons; it’ll likely be a long trial, and few of us are able to miss that much work. Others are less afraid of losing a paycheck and more afraid of losing their lives. Yesterday the court released a prospective juror who worked as a Michael Jackson impersonator. He was too easily identified and likely to be targeted by the cartel.
As Paste’s faithful chronicler of all things narcotraficantes, I was of course looking forward to Narcos: Mexico and its felicitously timed release at the start of the trial of a storied kingpin. Narcos is, like the war on drugs itself, kind of formulaic and predictable, in ways that are probably good and ways that are arguably drawbacks. That has not changed now that we’ve landed in Guadalajara to follow Kiki Camarena (Michael Peña) and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo (Diego Luna) into the heart of the early 1980s pot trade. The themes are constant: The “war” is manufactured every bit as much as the drugs, marketed every bit as much as the drugs, sold to people every bit as much as the drugs. Institutions such as governments and law enforcement agencies collude and everyone knows it. Any time a cartel boss goes down, a power vacuum opens and violent chaos erupts.
In the Sinaloan desert, a cannabis horticulture milestone has been achieved: the breeding of “sinsemilla,” or seedless, weed. Gallardo has a plan to consolidate the “plaza system” of local drug dealers into a larger organization. Or, as the strangely Big Lebowski-esque voiceover notes, “getting the scariest dudes in Mexico to work together.”
Strengths: Matter-of-fact emphasis on corruption and violence begetting violence. Bleary, faded, 1980-style visual sensibility. Excellent performances by Peña and Luna. Ponderous sense of inevitability—even if you don’t already know this story, which is told with a certain amount of dramatic license but which certainly happened, you know there is no way Camarena is going to win. Well-rendered sense of the futility of trying to bring down a hideously dirty system being parasitized by absolutely everyone. Not “everyone except the noble agents of American government.” Everyone everyone.