rakontur

5/4/2006

There’s a lot more killing in Cocaine Cowboys, the doc by Billy Corben (Raw Deal: A Question of Consent) about the wars to distribute coke in Miami in the 70s and 80s, when Colombians arrived and took over the windfall business. This was the dealer demimonde that turned Maimi from a sleepy town for retirees into the hip party destination for models, gigolos and anybody with narco-dollars and a ruthless violent streak. But before Don Johnson, Stallone and Madonna became the drugstore cowboys of that crowd, the place was ruled by real outlaws. Cocaine Cowboys reminds you just how nasty they could be, and still are. The doc is narrated mostly by “survivors” of that war, who are in and out of prison. We hear from Mickey Mundey, a pilot who admits to flying tons of coke into the country, and from Jon Roberts, a dealer who moved tons of coke onto the street. It took law enforcement years to catch up.

The doc moves from interviews to archival stills and TV footage of - what else? - corpses. And they are everywhere - in strip malls, stair wells, suburban houses and cars. The movie is a crime scene gallery, with editing that machine guns the images at you.

Once the Colombians make their mark, the sleepy southern city gets lawless and dangerous. A hit man in prison for the rest of his life tells of murder after murder of anyone who gets in the way - anyone, including girlfriends, families and children. If there were ever any doubt, the road to the disco was paved with dead bodies. As if he weren’t enough, we soon meet his boss, the queen of a Colombian drug trade who brought her sons into the business and watched most of those around her die. After all that carnage, she’s still at large.

Everyone who’s been involved with drugs has his or her personal war stories. Sometimes memory impairment from the drugs keeps those tales from being too vivid in retrospect, but not here. If you don’t get enough gore from the endless barrage of images, you get it from the stories that the participants tell, yet the film isn’t helped by the saturation image-fire that seems like the work of an editor who has himself just snorted a few ounces of coke. Jan Hammer’s dirge of a score sounds like it was written on Quaaludes. Sometimes it’s better not to mix your drugs.

Ghoulish or not, it’s hard to take your eyes off this doc, although you might wonder whether your sympathies belong with these guys, whose deadly trade has taken such a toll. Our narrators don’t seem to be suffering too much - except the hit man who’ll probably die in jail without too many people mourning that loss. Cocaine Cowboys could make for an exciting dramatic feature. I have to believe that people with that in mind are looking at it. What’s not to like about a lesbian with a taste for gold who builds a drug empire, one corpse at a time? Plenty. That’s what makes her such a great villain. Actresses may soon be killing each other for a shot at the role.