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Che
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 27 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Peter Buchman
Benjamin A. van der Veen
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 12, 2008
Running Time: 257 minutes, Color
Origin: Spain | France | USA
Language(s): Spanish | English
Summary
RATING:
Starring Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir, Victor Rasuk, Edgar Ramirez, Rodrigo Santoro, Yul Vazquez, Rene Lavan, and Catalina Sandino Moreno
November 26, 1956; led by Fidel Castro , a band of 80 rebels sails to Cuba. Among these young rebels is Argentine physician, Marxist, soldier, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Nation-less, strapped for resources and fueled only by determination, the group engages in swift, bloody battle to free the Cuban people from the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Che and his soldiers wrestle the nation's resources and affection from Batista's grasp. Though considered a hero by some, Che becomes a hugely controversial figure. At the height of his fame and power, he disappears. Entering South America incognito, Che recruits another band of guerilla fighters in the harsh Bolivian jungles. They embark upon a mission to spark revolution throughout Latin America. (IFC Films)
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
In both halves, Soderbergh emphasizes observation over ideology with an eye toward the mundane details of life on the front lines of a revolution.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Che looks dazzling, whether the camera is weaving through a battle or trying to bore into Che's haunted soul. Del Toro stands up to Soderbergh's relentless scrutiny. As for the movie, it's a reward to audiences eager to break from the play-it-safe pack. Game on.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Benicio Del Toro, one of the film's producers, gives a heroic performance, not least because it's self-effacing.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Leaving aside politics, it's quite an achievement in art.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
It's all about Guevara's education as a revolutionary and his development as a leader in the jungles and in battle.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Every Bolivian sequence has its Cuban parallel, which is why Che's two parts are best seen together. Guerrilla may be the more realized of the two--and could certainly stand on its own--but it is only comprehensible in the light of The Argentine. Elevating Guerrilla to tragedy, The Argentine puts some hope in hopelessness--and even in history.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
What this slow-moving but fascinating two-part portrait does do is hunker down in the jungles and mountains of Cuba and (in the second part) Bolivia, capturing in keen, almost Zen-like detail the trudging and trekking, the recruiting and strategizing, the fighting and the philosophizing.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Che is Soderbergh's most interesting film in years, defiantly eccentric and absorbing at its best.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Sheri Linden
The political realities of his legacy can be endlessly debated, but in this flawed work of austere beauty, the logistics of war and the language of revolution give way to something greater, a struggle that may be defined by politics but can't be contained by it.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
I was never bored, in four hours-plus. Whether or not it ends up becoming a great film (or films), this is miles and miles beyond anything I thought Soderbergh could create from this material.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Peter Brunette
If this earnest, two-part biopic with a total running time of 268 minutes sometimes lacks cinematic flair, the straight-ahead, chronologically-driven film will inform and, to a somewhat lesser extent, excite viewers everywhere.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
As political theater, Che moves from faith to impotence, which is certainly a valid reading of Communism in the 20th century. Yet as drama, that makes the second half of the film borderline deadly.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Che is a mass of contradictions, perhaps like the iconic revolutionary himself.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he's portrayed here.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Although Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che may have an epic running time of almost 4-1/2 hours, its scope is surprisingly narrow.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
In the end, the Cuban newspaper was nearly right: it's not the Castro character but the whole of this grand, doomed experiment that lacks "charisma and depth."
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Che is an impressive physical feat, but especially in the second part, which gives you day after day of rebels being killed and indigenous poor people not joining the good fight, you start to look forward to Che getting riddled by bullets. The whole movie is a forced march.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
It would be comforting, and tidy, to suggest that the director had waited all his life for the chance to make this film, as if it meant everything to him; yet I still have no idea what truly quickens his heart, and at some level, for all the movie’s narrative momentum, Che retains the air of a study exercise--of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one's total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie?
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
What potentially could have been the greatest asset possessed by Che - its unapologetic length - turns into its greatest detriment.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto Che Guevara's political life.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
You can't spell cliché without Che. And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right?
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
If Soderbergh's ambition was to make us feel just how dull it would be to a woods-dwelling communist guerrilla, he succeeded.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.3 (out of 10) based on 27 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Lizzie beth-1 gave it a5:
My taste for this was ruined by 1. Higher (unmet) personal expectations about Che’s actual achievements 2. Nil editorialisation except date/time stamping 3. Nil emotional impact due to the inexorable drive to its fait accompli impoverished ending 4. Tricky structuring of the narrative 5. badly handled subtitling – although I usually like subtitles 6. my tiredness due to its duplicate length (in less than comfortable cinema seating at the Sydney Film Festival). As with Soderbergh’s Full Frontal(2002), which I watched again over the weekedn for comparison, this entry is qutie a-typical of him. The director makes no effort to stamp his creative mark on this bio flick, I don’t think, except that some scenes were incomprehensively shot with a blue filter, possibly as a poor-man’s process (day-for-night). Che Parts 1+2 are intentionally minimalist – my contention being that it’s TOO minimalist, because how do you account for the subject’s infamous, mythic international cultural status borne of nothing but his 1. incorruptability with the peasants, and 2. his grimy beard? Much worse, the audience was just as worn down - in a bad way - from all the grime and violent gun battles as was no doubt Che himself (but even that wasn’t properly brought out). While on an intellectual level I can admire that, it does not a movie make unless there is an emotional connection. But if this overdue film’s very nature is such that audience affect and emotion is deliberately worn away, so all we’re left with is the (blue) footage just flowing in front of our eyes, then what was the point after 50yrs ? Maybe the point is that there wasn’t one. Not even for Soderbergh. I’d even go as far as to say that while at the end Benicio’s Che was, of course, utterly unresponsive to his team’s and his own capture, and to his dream’s complete failure as he was executed, ironically that was the most impactful he had been for me during the whole preceding 4hrs. Now how was THAT worth a film ? Lizziebeth-1, IMDb Sydney, Australia.
Tyrone gave it a10:
Unparalleled in execution and unbiasedness , a truly un-hollywood picture uncompromising and meticulously realized. there will never be another like it or not .
Becquer M gave it a9:
Captivating for Benicio Del Toro’s portrayal of the most romanticized political figure in the world, Stephen Soderbergh’s “Che” will likely be regarded as the pinnacle – or, at least, the standard for many years to come – of biopic movies. Only in the second part (titled “Guerrilla”) do the story and acting fall slightly out of touch with reality; the first part (“The Argentine”) remains superb as Soderbergh intertwines a present interview and black-and-white arrival in the United States narrative (1964) with the past (1955-58) Cuban revolution narrative. He carefully toys simultaneously with the documentary and historical fictional genres in an attempt to demystify the romantic Latin American communist revolutionary, which he achieves. Del Toro’s focus on the niceties of ‘Che’ lend to this demystification: he is pragmatic, humane, moral, has asthma, is a doctor, visionary, well read, intellectual, articulate, idiosyncratic, friendly, and not very good with women (in the relationship sort of way). Many, myself included, questioned Del Toro’s Best Actor win at Cannes last year; however, after watching the movie, I no longer have any doubts. Exceptional in its subtlety and reality, this movie tells the story of a man – who is a worthy synecdoche for the entire Cuban revolutionary movement – who attempts to realize his dream. Fidel Castro, his close confidant and comrade, is played tooth and nail by Demian Bichir, who does a good job of taking note of Castro’s exuberant and long-winded oratorical deftness. The others, who are perhaps closer to Che then Fidel himself, each give nuanced performances. ‘Pombo,’ who appears very often in Che’s diary, is maybe the only one of the bunch that really understands the idiosyncratic revolutionary – a minor touch that lifts the film to new levels. In the end, it does not matter whether you side ideologically with Che (I was dismayed when people in the U.S. actually protested the release of the film). What does matter is whether you are able to notice the little things that make “Che” a milestone in biopic cinematography.
Andy B. gave it a9:
Utterly different to normak Hollywood fare- Engrossing, as it builds towardsa crescendo.
W C gave it a10:
Excellent film! It's fascinating to watch the ideologues, like those at the New York Post come out of the woodwork to get their digs in...oh well, they wouldn't be the Post if they were objective!
Billy S. gave it a9:
Epic Filmmaking in every sense. Soderbergh has crafted his Godfather for the new century. Amazing in every detail with a brilliant Benicio Del Toro as Che. Don't talk about Oscar snubs for The Dark Knight and WALL-E, nothing for Che is just plain ignorant!
Jim G gave it a4:
I found this took a fascinating and polarizing figure of history and turned him into sheer boredom.
