Product: Blow [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 4.0
Another American Story
Its easy to feel compassion for George Jung, and BLOW, certainly tries to stoke compassion, but the true quality of this movie is the way it tells a classic American tale about ambition and greed through an everyman, a small man. This is no hero, more a stooge of larger forces, like the Columbian gangs he introduced to American markets, and American law.Johnny Depp gives his character the raw edge, the off-center determination to succeed at all costs, but also poignancy. Only we never learn where his flair for ideas comes from. His dysfunctional family makes him human, but there is a dimension to his character that is missing. Is it just middle-class industriousness twisted into illegal ambition for lack of another outlet?Paul Rubens gives the movie some notoriety, but his role is not that pivotal, nor his role memorable. It is Depp, operating in his character's mystery zone, that delivers and carries the whole effort. The story is the heart of the movie, and could perhaps have been more documentary and less personalized without losing its focus: the American fairy tale