A good movie

Since it had a solid reputation (among other things, Roger Ebert apparently really loved the damned thing), I was quite eager to check it out. Well, of course, I had heard of Carlos, he was especially notorious in France and was eventually arrested by the French, so it was pretty neat to see a movie focusing on, after Osama Bin Laden, probably the most famous terrorist that ever lived. Above all, I was really impressed by Edgar Ramirez who delivered here easily the best performance of his career. Indeed, I think he spoke at least 4 languages and I was mostly amazed when he spoke French as his accent was just so perfect during some scenes. There was also the fact that he played the same through 20 years at various physical stage and he was always so convincing. Unfortunately, there are very different versions of this movie/series out there and I saw one of the shorter versions with a running time of slightly less than 3 hours and it was pretty obvious that I didn't get the best version of this fascinating story. I mean, up until the end of the raid on the OPEC, the damned thing was quite thrilling and fascinating to behold. However, after this famous terrorist operation, it all became seriously disjointed though. Indeed, you get some seriously random scenes of Carlos's previous collaborators with basically no link with what happened before or after. Another issue was that even though Carlos was supposedly active for at least another decade, we never see him doing anything really concrete, except meeting some guys involved in the terrorism business. Anyway, to conclude, even though I probably saw the weakest version of this story, it was still pretty good though and it is definitely worth a look but make sure you watch the longest version possible (around 5 hrs) as it is probably the best one.

7/10