Che: Part Two - DVD Review

'by the time we get to an ending where Soderbergh's love affair with Che reaches nearly stratospheric levels, the film had deteriorated into a poor man's remake of the first part'

Watching two part, four hour long epics can be an arduous task, doubly so when it comes to commenting on them. Do you sit down and watch all four hours in one hit or break it up in the middle? How did the film maker intend you to see it? Regardless of this, do you assess the piece as one film or as two parts? Having sat through all four hours of Mesrine recently, I decided to break Che up into two and now, to be honest, I'm glad I did.

Happily, a lot of the elements that were successful in Che: Part One are largely present and correct in Che: Part Two. We still get Soderbergh's grubby photography in claustrophobic locations as troops of revolutionaries struggle to come to terms with their new existence. We also still get Che's (Benicio Del Toro) apparent mastery of events and people, as Soderbergh once again finds it difficult to get a sense of perspective and comes close to glorifying him and his group above and beyond the facts of the matter at hand.

What we don't get in Part Two that we did in Part One however, is any sense of character. At all. Certainly you could say that we found enough out about Che during the first film to justify not developing him as a cinematic entity here but then, really, what are we left with? Over two hours of him wandering round a jungle, offering little to keep us naturally interested in him. Whilst this decision is at least partially defensible, the similar decision on characters we haven't previously met (Franke Potente's Tania, Joaquim de Almeida's Bolivian President) isn't and to be honest I couldn't care less about them because I didn't know who they were, why they were doing what they were doing or what their end goal was.

By the time we get to an ending where Soderbergh's love affair with Che reaches nearly stratospheric levels and any meaningful analysis of whether Bolivia needed a revolution at all has been left by the wayside, the film had deteriorated into a poor man's remake of the first part which, like a lot of remakes, I really didn't need to see. Soderbergh should have stuck to just making a single film because this is inexplicably weaker than its predecessor and, depending on your answers to the questions posed in the first paragraph, only serves to muddy the impact of what was a really fantastic analysis of Che's early revolutionary life.

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'lacks the variety or tonal shifts that kept the first instalment interesting' - Phil On Film