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Che: Part Two, review

Che: Part One, in which Steven Soderbergh documented the revolutionary medic's struggle to overthrow Cuba's Batista government, offered an upward trajectory: through pain and setbacks to success and the establishment of Fidel Castro as the island's new leader.

Che: Part Two goes in the opposite direction, tracking the slow and bloody decline in his fortunes as he tries to export his insurrectionary politics to Bolivia.

It is, if one counts Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), the final instalment in the Guevara trilogy.

Che: Part Two, written by Peter Buchman and Benjamin A van der Veen, and photographed by Soderbergh under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews, can easily be watched on its own.

I must say I preferred it in its original four hours-plus form: it felt epic, event cinema of the kind that its audiences would look back on fondly in decades to come.

No attention is given to Che's adventures in Congo or to his unforgiving treatment of political enemies. So the film begins with him smuggling in to Bolivia sporting a disguise straight out of a John le Carré picture...

Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)