I lived in Freeport, Bahamas from 1980-1983. All television and radio was out of Miami and West Palm Beach, and Miami was only 30 minutes away on a 747. I often attempt to describe what it was like there to friends: the Haitian boat people, the Liberty City riots, the Mariel boat lift and the Colombian drug trade. But my anecdotes fall short of the mark. Prior to seeing "Cocaine Cowboys", the best I could do was tell them "watch 'Scarface'...with the exception of the final scene over-the-top hokey shootout, it was dead on." "Cocaine Cowboys" captures the true picture of the era there. Daily you would wake up, turn on the radio and get the body count: 3 men found in the trunk of a burning car; or a headless corpse found floating in a canal; or 4 men killed in a parking lot shootout, 2 civilians wounded in the crossfire. This was followed by an ad for Lanson's, a high end men's clothier, advertising a bullet proof men's dinner jacket, "What the best dressed Miamian is wearing." Driving down Flagler St. in Miami, you see a bus stop bench with an ad on the back: "Protectar usted y su familia" punctuated with pictures of an automatic pistol and a machine gun. The movie speaks for itself just like "Scarface". I have no doubt the individual narratives are accurate and non-hyperbolic. The movie does credit the cocaine "business" with cash infusion into the area and the resulting uplift of the overall economy. However, it omits the psychological impact on ordinary citizens, who saw little of the cocaine bucks: fear of getting caught in a crossfire and the depression of living in a combat zone. Also omitted from the storyline were some of the Colombian weapons innovations: the Colombians came up with armor piercing bullets and laser sighting long before the cops had them. Then the feds showed up en mass and the tide turned. I gave the movie a "9" only because it was a documentary and had no plot, no real acting. But if you wanted to know how it really went down then and there...this is your movie!

Shocking. With only this one word you could best express the movie Cocaine Cowboys. This document about the beginnings of drug business in the USA is brutal, natural and informative. I really liked that the “authors” told us also numbers, strategies, trading, techniques … everything what you could join with drug mafiosos. Prisoners told us how they were laughing about films in cinema or TV (for example Miami Vice) and they characterized it as stupidity. You can see the changes of the Miami City (especially infrastructure). It is apparent that police was, is and will always be one step behind and that this functional business is unstoppable. It is interesting that you are not bored, also because brutal shots (police photos), which you can see a lot in the film. And the motive? Money! If you want to know something more about drug cartels, Cocaine Cowboys is the right movie for you.

I wanted to like Cocaine Cowboys a more intriguing documentary than I did. It lacks no influence in terms of its information in the world of big-stakes crime of a period that seems long ago within a thirty-year time frame. I liked hearing details in the stories, like the car towing company the dealers had as their back-up when driving around the cocaine shipments. And the scenes involving- and properly invoking- the years of Noriega and Panama, as well as the small Mafia statistics that carry a lot of weight (no pun intended on the actual boss, more powerful than Escobar) all out of Columbia. And some of the interviews and clips shown are absorbing in their 'been-there-done-that' quality. But there's an oppressive side to how Billy Corben shoots, edits and puts the music to the film. I don't mind in the theory of it how one goes into a cocaine documentary making it a fast-pace story. But it veers more into being in a TV scope- think E! True Hollywood story more than anything- than more traditional documentaries. This may be fine for some wanting a messy rush. However it's repetitive and lacking in any creative flow, not just in how it jumps and pivots through its images of people talking or in what's going on as if it were a theatrical trailer, but to hear the same Scarface-like music over and over behind people talking who shouldn't have music going on in some of their answers. And the one guy who's interviewed most (I forget his name, he's the ex-big time Miami coke dealer with the mustache) adds to the annoyance factor after a while; somehow one might find the guy more interesting in smaller doses, not as the one blabbering and bragging for 45 minutes of the film until it gets to the gun-blazing Columbians.It might be worth a little bit of time if on TV, where it has more of a tabloid edge on things (if whatever edge I can't say for certain). But I'd much rather take on a book two or re-watch Blow or good parts of Scarface or Miami Vice to get a better dramatized take on the facts than see it all the way through again.

Although I had the opportunity to see the unfinished version of what is sure to be an award-winning film, I was thoroughly impressed by Cocaine Cowboys. Without giving anything away, let me just say that this film refrains from the type of overly preachy or overly glorified view of the cocaine business in the late 1970's and 1980's. A nice balance of character analysis mixed with an abundance of archival data kept my interest throughout the experience...and I walked out of the theater feeling as though I really learned a great deal, not only about historical occurrences, and their impact on a few central characters or society as a whole; rather, I left the cinema with a grasp of the time period from many different perspectives: Columbian drug lords, Cocaine transporters and dealers, special task force members assigned to find the aforementioned groups, local media then and now, land developers, vacationers, car salesmen, and your average Miamian. Perspectives offered were not limited in scope. I highly recommend this film.