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90Traveling faster than a fat line of blow snorted from mirror to nose, Cocaine Cowboys is all rush and no crash.
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88If "The Godfather" movies were based on real gangsters and some of them were still around to talk about the good old days, they might be as fascinating as the characters in Billy Corben's documentary about the cocaine import business in 1970s Miami.
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83Ultimately, Cocaine Cowboys' lesson isn't that crime doesn't pay, but that it maybe pays too well.
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75Although the movie doesn't exactly romanticize the period, the film still generates a twinge of pride in viewers who lived in South Florida during that time -- and lived to tell about it.
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75Cocaine cash financed Miami's renaissance, but the film never downplays the human cost at which that urban renewal was purchased.
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70An exhaustive, exciting and ultimately exhausting history of how that white powder, and the Colombian crime lords who imported it by the hundreds of kilos, transformed the culture and economy of Miami, for good and for ill.
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70Cocaine Cowboys' pulpy entertainment value merely lures us into a grim, kaleidoscopic look at how one city was both destroyed and, ironically, eventually saved by some of the worst human beings to walk the Earth.
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70A rogues gallery of flamboyant gangsters paint an anecdote-rich portrait of the drug trade, while a steady stream of cops, coroners and crime reporters furnish social commentary.
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67Cocaine Cowboys, which at times seems like it could have been edited by someone on coke, comes at you as a vast bloody river of underworld information.
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The story is fascinating, if a little overlong.
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60In a sense it's a shame that Cocaine Cowboys is so obsessed by violence, because the film has interesting points to make.
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60Cocaine is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it spurts, it spray-paints.
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Cocaine Cowboys would be a great one-hour television piece. Unfortunately, it's a two-hour long documentary that recalls, in scrupulous, unnecessary detail, the rise and fall of Miami's role as the cocaine capital of America.
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This is an ugly film, but with an undeniable allure.
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50Cocaine Cowboys might work better as a miniseries for television; as it is, the two-hour running time is fatiguing and some of the later material gets lost in the onslaught.
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50Before the cocaine economy, Miami was a sleepy seaside hamlet, a "virgin city" with a permeable border and largely unprotected coastline.
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50After a while I wasn't sure whether I was learning about cocaine or ingesting it.
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30Cocaine Cowboys is a tabloid headline, a movie as oppressive and inarticulate as the lives it represents.
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25There are a couple of grams of interesting stories about Miami's drug traffic in Cocaine Cowboys, but the good stuff is cut with 50 kilos of cinematic baking soda.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 2
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Mixed: 0 out of 2
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Negative: 0 out of 2
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Enrique9An excellent documentary. Its strong statements makes it a hard to take movie for general audiences. A must see!
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DianeH.9