In 1973, Venezuelan Marxist Ilich Ramirez 'Carlos' Sanchez is in Europe as a high operative for the PFLP. He assassinates targets. When his superior André is arrested, PFLP head Wadie Haddad assigns him to take OPEC oil ministers at their Vienna conference hostage. In December 21, 1975, his group succeeds in taking hostages but their attempt to find asylum ends in failure. He goes to work for himself causing havoc around the world.Olivier Assayas tries to fit a very big life into a limited space. Édgar Ramírez is great. This is a juicy part. I saw the shorter version and it has a compressed feel. Three hours is not enough to get the whole story. This needs to be a longer TV show or a shorter movie of the OPEC hostage taking. This has the great feel of the era. The hostage taking and the subsequent turmoil is fascinating and would make for a tight historical thriller.

This film is one of the few that inspired me to write a review. The film excelled for several reasons, the first for providing me with a quality educational experience and second for the quality of the film making that had goodies within goodies to offer.Carlos the Jackal was active during my youth, I grew up reading about him in the newspaper but this film put all of the knowledge together in one place and really made that knowledge relevant and understandable.The film itself was well made, the actors, the director, the crew, and the writer did a great job but the challenge the film makers had was to maintain quality while telling the dismal story that had become Carlos' life.Carlos the Jackal started his career as SPECTRE's James Bond. He was handsome, a lady killer, moneyed and fast with a gun but as life wore on, each new mission or event added a new dent that took him down a notch. The film documented the range of gradual failings and although there is a temptation to make humor from this absurdity, the style of the film is always serious. The film makers had a big job to show this quantity and quality of failure. You can literally make a check mark for each new insult every ten minutes.This film is about demise and the cluelessness of those involved.

First off. I had never really heard of this Carlos guy. But I think I have seen quite a few characters loosely based on his persona. So I started to see trailers promising this epic story about the true events of a terrorist legend spanning decades in Cinemascope. And I was thinking I should watch this. This looks promising. I didn't really expect it to be awesome. But it did look interesting.But the film didn't open in theaters here. And while it was waiting for a DVD or release I heard that there's two versions of this. Both a 3 hour compilation and a three-part 5+hr miniseries. Now, I am in a mindset that when there's several versions I want to experience the directors cut first. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the longer one. Often it is. But there are quite a few cases where Directors have preferred their theatrical cuts and only did longer cuts as Special Editions. Greatest examples here being James Camerons works with Aliens, Terminator 2, and the likes. And here in Sweden too, there's a common practice where the filmmakers have to do longer TV-edits in order to secure extra funding. Most of those times, the Theatrical Cut would be the Directors Cut. Well, in the case of Carlos, it wasn't. The 5hr version is the directors cut. So I tried waiting to see it the way it was intended. It never came. So now. 4 years later. I finally got a copy of the whole thing and over the course of two nights, I plowed through it.Part One, first night:Here you get the origin of this multinational antihero as he's starting out as a veteran of revolutionary wars and fights his way into the business of international terrorism for hire. And for me, this was the best part. It shows his talent for this gig. And also how haphazardly the operations can be slapped together. They say that beggars can't be choosers and sometimes you just don't have enough trustworthy or talented coworkers available, so the bar is lowered somewhat to fill up the roles that the operation needs. Again. This first part showed a lot of promise and almost made you root for this womanizing borderline-alcoholic that has no problems bombing civilians to make a point. And it ended with the crew on a bus going to do their biggest gig yet. Quite a cliffhanger.Part Two and Three, second night: Well, the plan sort of fell apart and Carlos is set on a downward spiral of lesser successes throughout the later parts. And, unfortunately, the quality of the film kind of followed. It became an increasingly tangled mess of a bloating cast and muddy motivations. I have very little recollection of what happened during the latter 2.5 hours. The only part I remember sticking out was where they repeatedly mention the location of Ulm. That made me giggle as I tried to recollect the full name of Johann Gambolputty. Eventually it ended and I was more exhausted than anything.Overall:Though I will say this. The costumes, the setting and make-up where all terrific. The lead did his damnedest and had no reservations on camera. Technically, the camera-work was a bit too close and shaky at times but mostly well done. Also, the sound was convincing and the music fit for the most part. Where the problem lies is in the script. Which needed shedding quite a few plot-threads. And it makes me curious how much of the fluff was kept for the 3hr cut. It'll probably take me quite a while before I watch that one, as I want to rid myself of this one just to make the judgment fairer. In conclusion. The whole piece was too bloated for me. Buffs of terrorism history will probably enjoy it more.

Carlos, the biopic about the famous international terrorist who took the world by storm in the final decades of the Cold War, is an ambitious, intelligent and exciting political thriller in the tradition of the best this genre has created. Edited from the 3-part mini-series made for French television, it stars Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez as the protagonist in an impeccable performance. Almost unknown before this, hopefully his Golden Globe nomination will catapult him into great roles in the silver screen soon.The movie is good but the mini-series is much superior.The problem with subtracting is that you must know how to cover your tracks well. Unfortunately some clumsy editing hurts the film version; every time a scene fades to black the viewer won't help wondering just what was cut. This becomes especially noticeable in the second half of the movie, which deals with Carlos' years of decline. Ten years of his life, too many settings, too many characters are crammed in too short an amount of time to look organic, to let the viewer breathe and absorb all the information.The editing, however, is nearly invisible in the earlier part of the movie, which deals mostly with his terrorist exploits across the world, culminating with the extraordinary raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, in 1975, that ended with dozens of world ministers kidnapped and flown out of the country by Carlos and his men. It's in these sequences that the movie resembles old-fashioned thrillers. Think of slow burners like All The President's Men or Three Days of the Condor for a good idea of the movie's look and feel.In fact Carlos is the late offspring and a love letter to the '70s, especially its cinema. Director Olivier Assayas's style would be unthinkable without the minimalist, introspective film language filmmakers like Alan J. Pakula, Francesco Rossi or Jean-Pierre Melville developed to breathe a new life into the thriller. I personally miss the grubby realism, the sparse dialogues, the menacing silences, the carefully-shot sequences of those movies; and in the age of super-duper secret agents a la Jason Bourne who can take on whole armies and of dizzying hand-held camera shots, this careful style, with its steady camera, sounds wonderfully fresh and full of possibilities. Let's hope more filmmakers start using it again.The movie also doesn't hide its interest in being a period piece. The movie powerfully restores the period to life: the music, the cool leather jackets and the silly bell bottoms, the chain smoking (how many packs must they've smoked throughout the movie?) in public spaces, the shocking lack of airport security; even the sexism of the age was captured in the Carlos' ambivalent attitude towards women.The cold war should distant enough in our memories to finally receive some intelligent attention. While Hollywood continues to be nostalgic about cartoonish Russian conspiracies and spies (Salt), Europe has been doing sensible movies about these troubled decades, like The Lives of Others, Farewell and now Carlos. More than just a compilation of trivia, the movie is a careful look at a period when people were divided in communists and imperialists. The movie shows how terrorists like Carlos managed to move through the world thanks to the help of ordinary people who shared his ideals, like foreign students living in Europe. Being committed meant working for the good of the revolution in any possible way, it meant hiding guns under beds and sheltering revolutionaries in flats.The film version sadly simplifies this matter, so that's another reason to watch the mini-series. It also includes the dozens of people, some famous others not so much, who were part of Carlos' life. The TV version can intimidate any viewer with its huge cast of minor characters: mostly members of the secret services and political leaders. Through Carlos we get a disturbing look at the promiscuity of the world's secret services, agencies that not only spied on each other but sometimes helped each other, in a complicated web of agents and double agents, of betrayals and looking the other way in exchange for small favours (a political assassination here, smuggling arms there). This way Carlos also travelled around the world protected by governments and intelligence agencies.The movie follows traditional narratives of crime movies in the vein of Goodfellas and City of God: first the rise of Carlos the terrorist playboy superstar; then his slow descent into oblivion, precipitated by alcoholism, obesity and illness, until his eventual downfall. Ramírez' role was physically demanding and he had to put on a lot of weight to play the character in his later years; it's a testament to his talent that he manages to change subtler things too, like the way he walks or the pitch of his voice. He also gets right inside Carlos' personality giving us an extravagant, cocky but also undignified portrayal of the terrorist. The movie plays Carlos as a rock star who lives furiously knowing that he'll die on the battlefield or assassinated. His obsession with a heroic death is one of the Carlos' psychological aspects better explored here and also an ironic counterpoint to Carlos' real but far more pathetic ending.For a serious and unglamorous look at terrorism and politics, Carlos has few rivals at the moment. Whereas others retreat into fantasies about CIA-sponsored child super-assassins (Hanna) or try to fool themselves into thinking journalists are still heroes (State of Play) and not just hired hands in the service of spin, here's a movie that shows the world as it is: violent, treacherous, driven by money and egos, populated by ordinary people whose dreams and ambitions don't mean much to those in power. Perhaps it's not as spectacular or uplifting as the pabulum out there, but for my money it's infinitely more rewarding.