"Right on, it's gonna take us longer to count it than it did to sell it!"

Rating: 8/10 (2 December 2018)

Who says marijuana isn't a gateway drug, look what it did for George Jung? Johnny Depp turns in an intriguing performance without resorting to scissor hands or a pirate outfit in this story of how the cocaine trade came to America in the Seventies, courtesy of Jung's involvement with the Medellin drug cartel. If you were around back then, you would have heard the name of Pablo Escobar pop up every now and then, sounding like a character from the original Mission Impossible TV series. What impressed me most in the story was seeing all those rooms filled floor to ceiling with boxes of money!!! Holy cow, could Jung and his associates have amassed that much cash in such a short period of time? The mind boggles.
Though she probably did the right thing for turning in her son, Mom Ermine Jung (Rachel Griffiths) seemed like a really wretched character. I couldn't figure out why Dad (Ray Liotta) stayed with her after all those times she left him when George was still a little guy. For his part, George seemed like a glutton for punishment considering all the arrests and that beating he took from Diego Delgado's (Jordi Mollà) goons after stealing Jung's California connection. He even got set up by his friends for that final bust, proving that in the drug business, you just can't trust anyone.
Penelope Cruz might be second billed here but she doesn't show up until much later in the story. Paul Reubens affects a fey character until it's time to get down to business, and even he can't believe the potential in the early going. You can never know for sure how true these stories inspired by real events can be, but George Jung's rise to the near top of the cocaine pyramid in the United States gets a pretty good showing here. Following Jung's release from prison in 2014, he still dabbles in the drug trade, and the movie helped him gain some notoriety with personal appearances. What would you expect from somebody with the attitude that "Life's a rodeo, the only thing you have to do is stay in the saddle. And I'm back in the saddle again."