User Reviews

I watched this 5-hour TV mini-series in a single day, in a single sitting, finally crawling into bed at 3am in spite of having to work the next day. The film traces the meteoric rise to international infamy of a figure who, in spite of being very-much real (he still languishes in a French jail, and has viewed the said film), has almost attained the status of myth in the contemporary consciousness. However, if there is one thing the series does extremely well, it is to collapse and invert the romance attached to the man; showing him as, yes, highly intelligent and daring, but also conceited, myopic, and despicably cruel.

And yet this film also explores the geo-political causes and contexts that produced the grotesque figure of 'Carlos' in the first place, which is perhaps most perceptively achieved by revealing to the viewer the grotesque power games that were being played out by the major cold war states, in which made places like Palestine and Beirut are turned into de facto battlegrounds.

But, coming back to the film itself, which stands out in its own right as a superb piece of biopic and historical art, 'Carlos' features some of the most exceptional acting I've seen from Edgar Ramirez. In numerous scenes he codeswitches from English to Spanish, then German, then Arabic, and then French, with seamless effort. This was the role of a lifetime, but I'm sure that, given the strength of his performance, Ramirez will be highly-sought talent in future productions of similar quality.

Edgar Ramirez's performance is the reason to see what is for the most part an over long recreation of the life of Carlos the Jackal.

The film covers the life of Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos, from his beginnings with the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) through to his capture in 1994 by the French in Sudan.

Three part miniseries is getting a theatrical release in the US from IFC films and the Sundance Channel, and while I think its great to see the widescreen images on a big screen, I'm left wondering if people won't tire of the narrative before the film comes to an end.

The trouble for me was that after two parts that cover about ten years of real time in three and a half hours of screen time the final two hours jumps through the remaining 15 years of Carlos's freedom. The result is a messy series of scenes that felt like they were the second half of longer sequences. Carlos, a cool as a cucumber fellow for most of the movie suddenly goes crazy when he finds the Hungarian police watching him. It's a funny scene but very much out of character. Strife between Carlos and his wife is reduced to occasional arguments with no set up. The final third also is way too much talk and not enough action. For me this final third derails the whole film with it's flaws reflecting back on what has gone before unfavorably (for example there is a few lines about Carlos's past before the movie starts at one point and it made me realize how little of Carlos's story was missing.)

Watching the film, especially in the final section I was struck that I couldn't really find a reason why the film was taking five and a half hours to tell the story. There was nothing going on on screen that made me feel that they needed the time to tell this story. As far as I'm concerned a story should take as long as it needs to be told but here the extreme length seems to work against the film since simply allows the filmmakers to meander too much. Carlos maybe charismatic but there isn't much to him and after a certain point not much happens.

I'd wait for cable.

(Those of you looking for bloopers will want to see this film since the film is full of mismatched shots with in sequences as hands, cigarettes and objects move from shot to shot. There is also a bombing that was done with CGI as the non reaction of all of the people on the sidewalks can attest.

"Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their "factories" from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals." - Arundhati Roy

Olivier Assayas' "Carlos" charts the life of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (aka Carlos), the infamous political terrorist. It begins the 1970s, when the fashionable cause was to oppose U.S. intervention in Indochina. Carlos, however, moved to Lebanon and took up the cause of the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Years later, in 1975, he holds 11 OPEC oil ministers hostage in Vienna. He subsequently spearheads several assassination plots, abductions and bombings, before setting up his own organisation (the "Organisation of Armed Struggle").

The son of a wealthy Marxist Lawyer, Carlos would eventually become too dangerous an association for other revolutionary groups. He brings unwanted attention, bad press, and so finds himself drifting away from revolutionary terrorism and toward naked opportunism. A gun for hire, he spends the next 20 years on the run, doing odd jobs, living under assumed identities and hiding from international authorities. Still, he holds onto his political convictions. "Demonstrations never change anything," he tells his friends, "words get us nowhere, it's time for action!" "Fighting capitalism with warfare is doomed to failure," comes the reply. "You are just another selfish, two-bit petty bourgeois looking for glory." Carlos counters: "You say I'm selfish? Why? For defending the innocent!?"

Once a Marxist-Leninist, Carlos made it his life goal to see the destruction of imperialism, personified by the United States. Concluding that this behemoth could not be destroyed by any other military rival, he set about designing a "campaign of terror" which would both separate the US from its allies and cause it to over-extend itself, militarily and financially. Carlos never seriously acted on these plans – by the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a dying creed – but he did make several interesting predictions. He believed revolutionary Islam would become the West's chief enemy, that the US would invade and reshape Iraq, that Syria would disintegrate, that Kosovo would become independent, that Sudan would be carved up, that Lebanon would fall apart, that Hezbollah would wither and that Libya would surrender to the US. He also believed that only North Korea and Iran would be able to resist neo-liberal capitalism, albeit only temporarily.

As a terrorist, Carlos specialised not only in murder, but rationalising murder. He believed terrorism to be the "cleanest and most efficient form of warfare", a "fact" which he used history to "support": the 1979 Iranian US embassy raid, Hezbollah's suicide attacks in Beirut, the 1993 killing of US Rangers in Mogadishu etc etc, all of which he believed stalled Washington's attempts at reshaping places like Iran, Somalia and Lebanon.

Olivier Assayas' "Carlos", however, is not interested in portraying Carlos as a radical agent. Instead it questions whether or not Carlos has any meaningful agency at all. In this regard, Assayas' Carlos is constantly at the mercy of others. He may have hostages, but Carlos is never calling the shots, is never in control and struggles to get groups to unite. Worse still, Carlos is always just another guy hunting for a job, chasing dollars and working for bosses. Throughout the film, Assayas' thus presents two clear poles. On one side, we see Carlos' pride, his vanity, his phallocentric obsessions and his love for subjugating others (particularly women). On the other, we have Carlos as a poor sap who's constantly pushed around by larger forces. In this way, the film seems preoccupied with counterpointing ineffectuality, castration and impotency with the machismo, egoism, narcissism and presumptions of political terrorism. For Assayas, disenfranchisement, disrespect and dis-empowerment are not only the flip-side to the machismo of terrorism, but its underlying cause. In this way, the film becomes "about" a very odd form of vanity: the terrorist is nothing, has nothing, and so must violently become something, do something.

"Carlos" premiered as a three part TV mini-series. It also exists in the form of a 5 and a half hour cut, a 338 minute cut, a 319 minute cut, a 187 minute cut and a 166 minute cut. This review is based on the 319 minute "cut", which is intermittently interesting but ultimately dull; a dry retelling of events.

Incidentally, Assayas wrote a short autobiographical article in 2005's Cahiers Du Cinema. This article was dedicated to the widow of Guy Debord, the famous French Marxist philosopher. In it, Assayas discusses the post 1968 revolutionary vanguard and his involvement in it. Assayas' films have themselves become increasingly political, moving from trashy meditations on global capitalism ("Boarding Gate", "Demonlover", "Summer Hours") to the yearnings of activists in 2012's "Something in the Air".

7.9/10 - See "The Third Generation" and Marshall Curry's "If A Tree Falls".

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.

I just saw the cinema version of Carlos, which runs close to 3 hours. I would recommend this film if you enjoyed Che (parts 1 & 2) and Merine (parts 1 & 2). The long running time allows for an expansive narrative, London, Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Khartoum; its like a Rough Guide to 1970's terrorism. Edgar Ramirez is excellent in the lead role, better looking than the actual Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, he piles on the pounds a la De Niro in Raging Bull. I don't know what was left out in the cinema edit, and I was left wondering how a Venezuelan national ended up as a central figure in the Palestinian PLFP. Some of the biggest crimes in the film are the 1970's fashion statements, Afghan coats, leather jacket/shirt & tie combos, and the obligatory berets. Carlos's testicular ailments take up as much screen time as his famous OPEC siege of 1975. I wonder if the inevitable "Osama Bin Laden" biopic will likewise focus on his kidney dialysis as a metaphor for his spiritual decline? Oh, the soundtrack is killer too.

"Carlos" is a French-German co-production from 2010 (so already over five years old) and it was written and directed by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. With that background, it is certainly quite a surprising fact that it won a Golden Globe and this also shows how well-done this little mini-series turned out to be. There are all kinds of languages (English, German, French, Spanish...) in here, so unless you are a multi-talent, make sure you get subtitles. This one consists of three episodes of roughly 100-110 minutes each, so if you want to watch it in one sitting, it is quite a challenge. Luckily for me, our local cinema recently decides to re-air it on the occasion of a special film day and this was an opportunity to see these 5.5 hours that I am glad I managed to take. It is pretty impressive how a film with this duration had so very few moments only where I felt that it dragged a bit perhaps. And the heart and soul of it is of course lead actor Edgar Ramírez who plays the title character and is included in almost every scene from start to finish. And when he is not included, then he is still in the center of it all as it is other people talking about his work or organisation.

This is the tale of one of the most notorious criminals from the 1970s and 1980s, the years of extreme left-wing terrorism and these are also the ideals he believed in. There are many controversial scenes in the film that are worth discussing in terms of Carlos' character, for example how he decides to cancel the airplane abortion and accept the money offered to him. I still would not say this makes him an opportunist as the other option would have been certain death and of course he wants to live, but really only to further help his cause of what he believes in. The cast also includes several German(-language) actors who should be pretty known to film buffs from my country such as Nora von Waldstätten, Katharina Schüttler or Christoph Bach, who was outstanding in my opinion and probably gave the best supporting performance of the film.

Of course, in order to appreciate the work here you will have at least a mild interest in the political developments of the 1970s and 1980s and what the global political climate was like. One of the most interesting aspects of the film was in my opinion how it was not Carlos developing away from terrorism towards the last quarter of the film, but how times have changed so much that he or his deeds just weren't in demand anymore. I do believe nonetheless that the last episode of this mini-series, which is mostly about the main character's decline, was maybe the weakest of the film, but just because the first two were so strong. I still don't believe it was bad at all. I also found it interesting how his comrades screw up on so many levels and occasions when he is not in charge, which also added to the airplane kidnapping sequence being the best about the entire film as it is extremely tense from start to finish and will have you at the edge of your seat for sure. This is where Carlos (the film and the character) peaked in terms of their power and influence. But also scenes like the one in Libya when they just stand there and nobody cares were interesting from a political perspective. These show that in the grand scheme of things, not even Carlos has the power to make it to Iraq. And that one minister constantly sucking up to Carlos was pretty hilarious because you realize how much of a scumbag he is. Anyway, these are obviously just very few scenes (I also have to mention the scene with the French police officers at the apartment and the ending with another French guy, which were both brilliant) and impressions from an extremely long film/mini-series. If you can find a connection with the subject, then this will be an even more rewarding watch I guess. It was quite fun to see it on the big screen for sure. The central character here truly deserves his own movie and even if it says so (they had to do it) that it is a work of fiction, there is a whole lot of truth and real life events in here from start to finish that exactly show us what Carlos' life was like. He is in his late 60s these days and still in jail, probably until his death. Go see it now, Assayas and Ramírez did an amazing job here.

CARLOS! He of the petulant pout struttin down the street, he gets the funniest looks from everyone he meet! Now this is a man who can "do" passionate revolutionary engaged in heated sizzling discussion at the cafe in London just as well as anyone but when this boy touches his own body in the little make shift steam room oh so suggestively well rub a dub dub and peek a boo pubes!! (And all of this long before the metrosexual phenomenon! ) When this man kisses his gun and says to his latest galpal, revolutionary chick #3, "lick my grenade!" I mean we know we're in the midst of a film that is likely one of the Best Films of the Year!

Benicio del Toro was NOT available, but he was not missed at all! Why for he'd already JUST 'done' "Che" and it would have been terribly confusing! Imagine when revolutionary chick #2 - the one with the tight sweater and massive lady pillows - says, "look at Che!" his method acting would have probably DEMANDED as a historical imperative that he rip off his clothes and hold everybody hostage for a 3-way mirror! Did someone say "3-way"?! I just think that Olivier Assayas really outdid himself with this Provocative Look at the Baader Meinhoff phenomenon, filmed in glorious hand-held medium closeups throughout - why good lord it made it seem to REAL I felt I was in the room with them myself, makin history and makin love! If it'd been one of those new fangled 3-D productions I think I would have popcorn might have ended up creamed corn!

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.