Film Night: Loving Pablo Review

Hey guys!

So it was time for another film night, and I saw that Loving Pablo had been added to Amazon Video, so I decided to give it a watch.

It’s a film about the story of Pablo Escobar, told mostly in the point of view from Virginia Vallejo, a girlfriend of Pablo and famous journalist in Colombia. I have seen Narcos, the Netflix documentary series about the same story, which obviously had more detail since it’s spread over seasons and many shows, rather than this which is a 2 hour film.

I like the story, if you’ve seen Narcos then a lot of the story you will know or have seen before. The big differences from Narcos and Loving Pablo is the point of view; With Narcos being told by the American agents, and this being from the point of view of Virginia. Pablo is played by Javier Bardem with Virginia being played by Penelope Cruz.

If you’ve never seen either and have not heard of Pablo Escobar, he was one of the most notorious drug lords in the World from Colombia, with the film documenting him at his heights, before being brought down by the authorities of Colombia assisted by the Americans.

The film is an adaptation from the book by Virginia Vallejo, and is set when she meets him at a VIP party at his house. They become close, and she becomes his girlfriend even though Pablo is married. You see him get elected as a congressman, and the story follows from there. Since this is taken from Virginia’s perspective, the beginnings of how Pablo got started isn’t seen in this movie.

It has everything you’d want in a film of this type, with girls, drugs, guns and killings all present within the story.

The film was a good watch, but the story line felt a bit fractured after watching the TV series. The language was mainly in English, with bits of Spanish thrown in to add authenticity, but I think it would have done better being in Spanish, at times the English was actually harder to understand.