Cartel Land (2015)
6/10
Intimate, if tunnel-visioned, look at 2 characters on opposite sides of the war against cartels
13 July 2015
Saw this at the screening with Kathryn Bigelow and director Matthew Heineman at the Arclight Hollywood. Generally impressive documentary that primarily follows two fascinating central characters: "Nailer," a man leading a vigilante group attempting to stop drug trafficking on the Arizona border, and 'El Doctor,' the charismatic leader of an anti-cartel militia in Michoacan, Mexico. The power of the film lies in how intimately it tracks these two characters. You get a first-hand look at what it's like being on the front line on the wars in "Cartel Land." The filmmaker bravely places himself next to our central characters even as bullets fly by. The weakness of the film, in my opinion, is that we never really get a sense of the larger situation of the Mexican drug cartels. The documentary assumes that you'll read about them elsewhere, and instead focuses on the immediate experience of the main characters. While this serves as an engaging and immediate narrative, it provides for a bit of a tunnel-visioned experience to the broader picture on the war on drugs. Heineman argued that his intention with the film was simply to tell these personal stories, but in my opinion it suffers with the lack of information about the cartels themselves to give these powerful personal stories their context.
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