Narcos: Netflix’s epic take on US/Colombia v Pablo Escobar

There’s stylish action aplenty in Netflix’s take on Colombia’s war against cocaine king Pablo Escobar.

NARCOS S01E06 " Eplosivos"

Like you, perhaps, I can still remember those famous photographs of the tawdry death of drug lord Pablo Escobar, tracked down and killed by a US-trained Colombian hit squad in a barrio in Medellin on December 2, 1993. One showed a fat, dead man on the roof of a house; another depicted US agents crouching beside his corpse as though it were a hunting trophy.

Escobar was wanted for the killing of a justice minister, a presidential candidate and a newspaper editor on an anti-drug crusade; for masterminding the midair bombing of a Colombian jetliner in 1989 that killed 110 people; and for shipping tons of cocaine — cheap to produce, highly addictive, and with incredible profit margins — to the US and Europe.

Now we have the greatly anticipated original 10-part series Narcos — the title is the local term for drug dealers — from rapidly growing streaming giant Netflix, which chronicles the real-life stories of infamous drug kingpins of the late 1980s, led by Escobar, and their clashes with law enforcement agencies.

Promoted with a tagline that says it all, “There’s no business like blow business”, it’s full of action-movie fireworks, set-piece escapes and gunfights, along with a persuasive message: the drug policy pursued so vigorously by the US government over the past 30 years has not worked. Like David Simon’s The Wire, Narcos is a kind of serialised procedural, a “visual novel”, fundamentally concerned with the way the fatuously titled “war on drugs” (a term first used by president Richard Nixon in 1971) remains an unmitigated disaster and how governments will never find a way to police desire and human frailty.

Brazilian actor Wagner Moura stars as Escobar; Pedro Pascal (Oberyn Martell from Game of Thrones) plays Javier Pena, one of the Drug Enforcement Administration agents tasked with bringing him to justice, while Boyd Holbrook (Hatfields & McCoys) is Steve Murphy, the agent who took the rooftop photographs.

They provide the other side of this intense cat-and-mouse narrative in the dual-language series — it’s 60 per cent in English and 40 per cent in Spanish with subtitles — and the US agents themselves have a problematic relationship with legality. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the narco world it’s that life is more complicated than you think; good and bad are relative concepts,” says Holbrook. “In the world of drug dealers you do what you think is right and hope for the best.”

Written by Chris Brancato, a successful TV writer who most recently contributed episodes for NBC’s well-received Hannibal ; the establishing pilot episode is directed by Jose Padilha, who is also among the producers.

It’s both a blockbuster 10-hour entertainment — a fast, gaudy, stylish orchestration of special effects, stunt work and cleverly interposed archival footage — and a sociological polemic based, its producers say, on exhaustive research. A pre-titles card gives us some idea of what to expect: “Magic realism is defined by what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”

A superb action mechanic, best known for last year’s remake of RoboCop but, in certain circles, more respected for his 2007 Brazilian film Elite Squad, Padilha and his writer eschew the slow-burn establishing of characters common in conventional TV drama. Instead they take the full-on Scorsese approach from Goodfellas, using a pilot-long narration from the Holbrook’s Murphy with the tonal quality of a wryly ironic interior monologue.

Murphy plunges us straight into the back­story, beginning in 1989 when, undercover and embedded in Colombia, he starts a bloodbath in a narcos’ nightclub called La Dispenseria. Murphy then introduces Escobar, the gangster with eyes everywhere, in a brilliant scene where he berates some recalcitrant drug cops. “Look, I make deals for a living,” Escobar tells them. “You can stay calm and accept my deal or accept the consequences: silver or lead?”

Padilha gives us an accelerated lowdown on the history of how Colombia became the cocaine capital of the world, and the way Escobar becomes the megalomaniac innovator, hiding the drug in everything from fish and coffee to compliant female mules. He ultimately scales up his operation to employ remote-controlled submarines carrying cocaine into the waters off Miami, and buys used Boeing 727s to smuggle 10,000kg a time. “It didn’t take Miami long to get addicted,” says Murphy. “It was like the whole city was running around trying to get this shit.” The corpses pile up; the hippie marijuana dealers in flip-flops are replaced by Colombian goons armed with automatic weapons.

In both its approach to script and its aesthetic, Narcos reminds me of the brilliant Italian two-season series Romanzo Criminale, which still occasionally cycles around on Foxtel’s Showcase. Set in the 1970s, it tells the bloodthirsty and true story of a notorious and highly dangerous Italian crime family, Rome’s Banda della Magliana. The rather stylised series dramatises the drug-fuelled mayhem wreaked during the violent political period that became known as anni di piombo, or years of lead (possibly a reference to the vast number of bullets fired).

The Italian gang was responsible for some of the most shocking and brutal acts, ranging across extortion, drug trafficking, assassination, kidnapping, high-stakes robbery and even terrorism. Director Stefano Sollima aesthetically exploits a variety of TV genres: film noir, prison movies, true crime and melodrama; he also pays homage to The Sopranos and, imaginatively utilises the stylistic tropes of the subgenre of early 70s tough-guy Italian crime and action movies known as poliziottesco.

Narcos obviously feeds off all kinds of period Latin action movie conventions and, as in Romanzo Criminale, the violence is gross, shocking, bloody and animalistic but never arbitrary, simply reflecting the corrosive nihilism that infects each of its swaggering characters.

The action is skilfully mounted, gracefully choreographed and vividly edited, and the burnished photography by cinematographer Mauricio Vidal, much of it subjectively and compelling shot with handheld cameras or using Steadicam, is full of mean-streets visuals worthy of Scorsese. At times the camera work is so subjective you feel you can smell the metal of the weapons, the gun oil and solvent, the cordite smoking from the bloodied wounds.

Padilha doesn’t hammer the absurdity and surrealism of it all: even at its most intense the series remains cool and composed, hovering on the edge of abstraction, sometimes formally beautiful.

In its urgent and violent way, the series does what the best crime fiction does — describes the limits of democracy, the crisis of the judicial system, and the shadowy borders between those who police us and the underworld. In fact, in Narcos the two are at times indistinguishable.

There’s also a nice combination of a kind of humorous burlesque at times and high seriousness. Convoys of small coloured cars carry huge amounts of cocaine, moving as if dancing to a mariachi band, violent men oddly touched by their favourite nightclub songs join in with full voice, bodies collapse in surreal balletic formations.

Moura’s Escobar has an eerie, detached style about him — he’s portly, potbellied and loved by the people for building churches — but something unshakably cool as well. At times he seems like a parody of the drug lord, not to be taken seriously — Escobar never adopted the look of Colombia’s upper classes, dressing in a new casual shirt and new sneakers every day — but, when required, savagely intent, unafraid to detonate bombs aboard passenger flights.

As this series is from Netflix, all the episodes are released at once, creating one long, extended movie.

The pilot focuses on how Colombia became the cocaine capital of the world, and while Escobar is skilfully established, when it comes to our heroes — the crime fighters — we only really meet Murphy.

Our DEA charmer has the right combination of boyish adventurism and deadly adult mission, each trait ebbing and flowing often at odd and unpredictable times. For him it becomes a moral crusade against diabolical savagery and there’s a sense about the series of an archetypal American narrative in the drive of the DEA agents to conquer the wilderness represented by Escobar.

All in all in its measured beginning, Narcos has a skittering vitality; it is as compellingly watchable as it is frightening.

Narcos, global premiere on Friday at 5.01pm AEST exclusively on Netflix.