Unless you were a coke dealer in '70s or '80s Miami, it is safe to say that Cocaine Cowboys will blow your mind. Covering the wild years that took Miami from a provincial Southern town to a glamorous and ultra-violent Al Pacino set, Billy Corben's two-hour epic documentary dropped my jaw about five or six times, with innumerable eye-widenings filling out the gaps. I think I heard a few jaw/floor collisions elsewhere in the screening room, too.
The majority of Cocaine Cowboys focuses on three talking heads: John Roberts, cocaine trafficker; Mickey Munday, pilot/cocaine smuggler; and Jorge "Rivi" Ayala. The captions cheerfully describe Ayala as an "enforcer," which is accurate, although "guy who kills people for coke traffickers" might be more precise. Whatever the semantics, the bloody cost of the cocaine business is not in any way glossed over, though the high real-life body count adds a guilty quality to the hilarity and excitement. The familiar synth pulse provided by Miami Vice composer Jan Hammer should be a cue to the exact level of profundity here. Like its characters, Cocaine Cowboys seems to be having too much fun for much remorse. But fun it is; the sheer audacity of these guys is weirdly endearing, at least before the bullets start flying. In perhaps the most hysterical moment, a former Miami Herald reporter describes an incident where a sermon — on the evils of drug abuse, no less — was interrupted by bags of cocaine falling out of a smuggling plane and through the church roof.
Stranger than fiction, and possibly more entertaining. This despite next to no redeeming social value; I got home to my girlfriend and found myself unable even to describe the film. My mind was shot. So we're seeing it together this weekend. To paraphrase George Carlin, I guess Cocaine Cowboys makes you feel like more Cocaine Cowboys. — Peter Smith
