rakontur

11/1/2006

COCAINE COWBOYS Director Billy Corben’s documentary about the Colombian cocaine trade that overran Miami in the 1970s and ’80s should be, by any reasonable expectation, an average rise-and-fall story of drug dealers living the life and then doing the time. Instead, Cocaine Cowboys is more luridly thrilling than we could have imagined — and much more horrifying. Bringing together the traffickers, DEA agents and hit men who witnessed it firsthand, the film creates a lively, menacing oral history of Miami’s evolution from quiet retirement community to prosperous coke mecca to deadly haven for violent crime. Corben and co-editor David Cypkin dynamically cut between talking heads, local news footage of the time, and well-placed fictional re-creations, achieving a hypnotic, energetic pace without glossing over the real misery brought on by the overflowing body count and shattered lives. But the film’s greatest strength is its wealth of frank interview subjects — specifically, its bad guys (the smugglers and the enforcers), who are a mesmerizing bunch possessing varying degrees of blasé sociopathic behavior. (Little wonder that the detectives interviewed here still sound haunted by these criminals’ viciousness.) Some will object to Corben’s adrenalized style, dark sense of humor and seemingly amoral tone — the film even flaunts a synthesizer-heavy score from Miami Vice composer Jan Hammer — but Cocaine Cowboys’ pulpy entertainment value merely lures us into a grim, kaleidoscopic look at how one city was both destroyed and, ironically, eventually saved by some of the worst human beings to walk the Earth. (Sunset 5; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Tim Grierson)