Once set for a release this month, it looks like Radius-TWC has pushed back their drama Escobar: Paradise Lost a bit, pushing it out of prime awards season. Featuring Benicio Del Toro taking on the infamous crime figure Pablo Escobar, it’ll now hit VOD next months before a theatrical release early next year.
Coming from Life of Pi‘s Andrea di Stefano, who directs here, the film follows a surfer named Nick (Josh Hutcherson), who falls in love with a girl, Maria, whilst visiting his brother in Colombia. When he realizes her uncle is the drug kingpin, things get a bit dicey. While we have yet to see it, THR said it’s “an impressive debut, an ambitious project pulled off with confidence” while Variety added, it’s “an odd mix of action movie, romantic melodrama and cautionary traveler’s tale, which works better than it should thanks to Del Toro’s fascinating performance and Di Stefano’s assured, muscular helming.”
The first U.S. trailer has now landed, which can be seen below for the film also starring Claudia Traisac, Brady Corbet, Carlos Bardem, and Ana Girardot.
More than twenty years after his death in 1993, Pablo Escobar’s impact on Colombia is still impossible to measure. His cocaine trafficking empire made him one of the wealthiest criminals in history, and he was responsible for the deaths of thousands. Yet the Robin Hood-like persona he cultivated, along with his brief political career, rendered him a folk hero among some of his fellow Colombians. Escobar: Paradise Lost is a chilling drama, based on a true story, that offers us a fascinating glimpse of Escobar’s deadly allure.
Told from the perspective of Nick (Josh Hutcherson), an innocent surfer from Canada, Escobar: Paradise Lost unfolds during the final years of Escobar’s reign. Nick and his brother Dylan (Brady Corbet) set up a modest surfing retreat near Medellin, where Nick meets the woman of his dreams, Maria (Claudia Traisac), who is busy campaigning for her politician uncle. That uncle turns out to be Pablo (Academy Award-winner Benicio del Toro), who invites Nick to a party at his “cottage,” a sprawling, Xanadu-like jungle fortress. When he hears of the trouble Nick and Dylan are having with some local thugs, Pablo vows to “take care of it.” The thugs turn up dead, and suddenly Nick finds himself immersed in a world of wild extravagance, corruption and bloodshed — one he will find nearly impossible to escape.
Paradise Lost opens on January 16th and on VOD a month prior.