Minor spoilers in this comment.
El Colombian Dream is an awful boring movie that does not deserve to be watched at all. It started out good with an original narrative, good dialogs and good use of cameras and art direction, but that's about every good thing this movie has to offer. The movie takes one whole hour to set its plot (that is a whole hour for the drug dealers to loose their drug and our "heroes" to get a hold of it), and only then, the actual story begins. That first hour doesn't add anything decisive to the story nor explores characters in a fascinating way.
Characters are another thing that makes this movie so tedious. There is not one character that makes a single conscious choice. And that's what supports the storytelling the fact that characters keep on making the wrong choices and so the plot can keep on getting complicated. It's really a sitcom-structure that turns out pathetic for a two hour fifteen minutes movie, while it also transforms characters in nothing but cartoon like clichés.
Now is it fair for a movie to rely entirely on character's lies that need to be supported to maintain its storytelling? It certainly is not. I.e. if El Duende wanted to kill his boos why not just grab a gun and shoot him, instead of putting together such a complicated and uncertain plan.
At another point of the movie the narrator says that 'it suck's to born in a country that turns poets into killers' (or something to that effect), and one can't help to wonder if it's really the country's fault. This country sucks in many ways that's a fact, just as every country in the world sucks in one or another way (but to be truthful, this country also many great things just as every other country) but is it fair to blame it on the country for the fact that a silly immature cartoon like character ends up in jail? Not to mention that after he realized that he wasn't cut out to be a part of that business he had plenty of time and chances to get out of it. I believe it would be fairly to blame it on stupid writing that made the character take one wrong stupid choice after the other.
Another thing that troubles me is the fact that the movie turns around a load of ecstasy like pills when that's exactly the one drug that Colombia is not known to be a quality producer. Was it not lees complicated (and more realistic) to make it a load of cocaine? Where the movie makers contaminated by the "realismo mágico" (magic realism) that spreads on almost every piece of Colombian literature and art craft? Did they wanted to make it an original out-of-this-world story? Who knows. The fact is that it turns out ridiculous.
If they wanted to shoot yet another Colombian made drug mafia movie, there are so many real life stories published out there, which happens to be better and much more fascinating than this one, that any of them would have made up a better scrip.
On an aside note there is a kind of unwritten rule where we (colombians) must embrace and support the movies made in our country, just for the fact that movie making is an almost impossible task in Colombia. But the truth is that one cannot embrace and support such a bad movie as this one.
One last word: don't watch it.
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