Benicio Del Toro shines in ‘Escobar'

There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance in “Escobar: Paradise Lost,” a fictionalized portrait of the late Colombian drug lord (1949-1993) that traffics in the disconnect between Pablo Escobar’s well- documented ruthlessness and his equally conspicuous acts of charity.

Early scenes contrast Escobar’s funding of a public health clinic in a seaside village with, only a short time later, the gruesome murder of some local toughs who have been harassing his cherished niece’s fiance.

Some of this tension is quite artful, as when we are first introduced to Escobar, played by a mesmerizing Benicio Del Toro, romping in his swimming pool with a gaggle of young children in a squirt-gun shootout.

(Escobar died in a a 1993 gun battle, shortly after escaping from the swank prison that he had voluntarily checked himself into, in a deal with the Colombian government.)

But too many of the movie’s incongruities just linger in the air, like bad smells. Take that fiance, for instance.

Played by Josh Hutcherson, the squeaky-clean Canadian tourist Nick is already head-over-heels in love with pretty Colombian do-gooder Maria (Claudia Traisac) before he discovers that his bride-to-be’s “Uncle Pablo’” is a murderous cocaine dealer. As implausible as such naivete would have been in the late 1980s, when these fictionalized lovebirds are said to have met, Nick barely blinks when he discovers what the rest of the country - if not the world - already knows.

A couple of scenes later, Nick is shown stumbling across some of Pablo’s goons washing blood off themselves, with what looks like a corpse in the background. He thinks nothing of it.

This willful ignorance just doesn’t makes sense.

It’s particularly discordant because the film begins with a prologue showing Pablo, on the eve of his 1991 surrender, enlisting Nick’s help in hiding his multi- billion-dollar fortune - a project that entails Nick committing cold-blooded murder. The rest of the film is a flashback explaining just how Nick got into this predicament in the first place, and then how he attempts to wriggle out of it without endangering his own life.

As unconvincing at the first half of the tale is, the second half - in which Nick must disentangle himself from a deadly web that he has woven - amounts to a surprisingly taut and well-constructed (if slightly conventional) thriller. First-time writer-director Andrea Di Stefano, an Italian actor turned filmmaker, shows an assured hand behind the camera, if not the keyboard. The suspense that Di Stefano generates in the film’s final hour is genuine, and the action gripping.

Much of this is because of Del Toro, whose portrayal of Escobar is a marvel of seductive and methodical malevolence. If the character’s charm is not quite enough to explain how Nick, a naive, God-fearing kid, would have been able to turn a blind eye to Pablo’s obvious viciousness, it nevertheless makes for a highly watchable endgame of cat-and-mouse.

The characters of Nick and Maria are not real people, though Escobar was one of nine siblings, and is said to have had a niece whose boyfriend was similarly involved with Escobar. As for the character of Pablo, while the details of his life are portrayed with reasonable accuracy, it is Del Toro’s performance here that brings the man - and the monster - to chillingly persuasive life.