Blow Sucks

he crime genre has been revitalized in the past few years by the fresh new directions taken by films like Donnie Brasco and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as well as the rich television of The Sopranos. But you wouldn't guess that from watching Blow, a rote rise-and-fall epic of a cocaine smuggler that could easily have come out a decade ago.

Blow is based on the real life of George Jung (Johnny Depp), the man who almost single-handedly brought "blow," or cocaine, into the United States. The film chronicles Jung's rise from low-life pot dealer to low-life coke lord, along with his eventual regression back to just plain low-life. Jung is pursuing the American dream of the late '70s: heaps of nose candy and an endless supply of aviator sunglasses.

It's a role that a younger Al Pacino would have nailed, somewhere in between his enraged egomaniac in Scarface and the beleaguered morality of Carlito's Way. Unfortunately, Depp hollows Jung into a gutted shell, a man who isn't doing it for either one of most sympathetic criminals' grand motives-power or glory-but instead for cash, their crude denominator.

In every scene, Jung looks like he's coming down from a bit too much of his own powder. Crime sagas are appealing because we vicariously experience the characters' transgressive success and inevitable punishment, but this guy is just a dirtbag-and not the brightest bulb in the box at that.

Depp isn't supported by much of a cast, either. Franka Potente (Run Lola Run) is cut short early on as the love interest, only to be unsatisfactorily replaced by Penelope Cruz. Her angelic beauty is sorely miscast in a fiendish and shrewish Columbian trophy-wife. In crime movie terms, Cruz's persona is closer to Apollonia in The Godfather than Sharon Stone in Casino. Newly-interesting Paul Reubens (formerly, Pee Wee Herman) is not given enough space to develop out of his stereotypical flamboyantly gay party boy role, and Ray Liotta can't do much better as Jung's hard-working, straight father. No one else makes much of an impression at all.

The guilt for all this lies in large part on the bumbling, hack directing of Ted Demme (best known for his Denis Leary specials). If Hollywood was the mafia, Scorcese would have Demme whacked for skimming right off the top of Goodfellas-from the narrating voice-overs, to the Stones-heavy soundtrack, to the jumpy montages of money-counting and partying that gloss over the details of the drug business rather than making it real.

Perhaps this is all just nitpicking, but when a single episode of The Sopranos playing later that night proved far more engrossing, Blow's mediocrity seemed all the more disappointing.