Blow is a 2001 American biographical crime drama directed by Ted Demme. It runs 124 minutes. Johnny Depp plays George Jung, the U.S. drug trafficker who helped build a cocaine network with the Medellín Cartel and its leader, Pablo Escobar.
The film carries a tagline that has done a lot of work for it over the years: “based on a true story.” That phrase is doing more than it should here. Blow wants the weight of a true-crime epic and the swagger of a rise-and-fall picture. What it delivers is a long, well-dressed montage of a man making money and losing it, with the moral accounting left mostly off-screen.
Trailer, via CRITERION.
George Jung in Weymouth, Massachusetts
George lives in Weymouth, Massachusetts, with his parents, Fred and Ermine. When George is 10, Fred files for bankruptcy but tries to teach his son that money is not important. It is a clean setup, and Demme uses it as the film’s whole thesis. Everything George does afterward is an answer to that lesson.
In the late 1960s, the adult George moves to Los Angeles with his friend Tuna. They meet Barbara, a flight attendant, who introduces them to Derek Foreal, a marijuana dealer. With Derek’s help, George and Tuna make a lot of money. The film is best in this stretch, before the cocaine, when the scheme is small enough to feel like a scheme and not an industry.
Kevin Dulli, a visiting college student from Boston, tells them about demand back home. They start selling marijuana there, buying directly from Mexico with help from a Mexican drug lord, Santiago Sanchez. Then George is caught in Chicago trying to import 660 pounds of marijuana. He is sentenced to two years.
Barbara Buckley and the Danbury Sentence
The Barbara thread is the film’s one real attempt at a cost. George skips bail to take care of her, and she dies of cancer. Her death marks the disbanding of the group of friends. It is the only loss in Blow that lands, and it lands because the film slows down long enough to let it.
While hiding from authorities, George visits his parents. His mother calls the police, who arrest him. He is sentenced to 26 months in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. That detail matters more than the film seems to know. His own mother turns him in, and Blow treats it as a plot turn rather than the knife it is.
In prison, his cellmate Diego Delgado has contacts in the Medellín Cartel. Diego convinces George to help him go into the cocaine business. This is where the film’s second half begins, and where its problems start compounding.
Cartagena and the Man from Medellín
After his release, George violates his parole conditions and heads to Cartagena, Colombia, to meet Diego. As the operation grows, Diego is arrested, leaving George to find a way to sell 50 kilograms. George reconnects with Derek in California, and the two sell all of the cocaine in record time.
George then goes to Medellín, Colombia, and meets Pablo Escobar, played by Cliff Curtis. The film treats this meeting as the summit of George’s life. It is staged that way, and it plays that way, and it is still less interesting than the earlier scenes of two guys moving weed out of a suitcase.
The cast around Depp is deep. Penélope Cruz plays Mirtha Jung. Franka Potente plays Barbara Buckley. Rachel Griffiths plays Ermine Jung, and Ray Liotta plays Fred Jung. Jordi Mollà is Diego Delgado. Paul Reubens is Derek Foreal. Miguel Sandoval, Max Perlich, Ethan Suplee and Kevin Gage fill out the network.
What the Screenplay Leaves Soft
The screenplay is by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes, adapting Bruce Porter’s 1993 book Blow: How a Small Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All. That title promises a reckoning. The film delivers a highlight reel.
Depp is fine. He is almost always fine. But George Jung is a passive figure for most of the runtime. Things happen to him. He reacts. The film mistakes that passivity for tragedy, when it is closer to drift.
The bigger issue is scale. Blow keeps telling us the operation is enormous — a billion-dollar cocaine empire, the Medellín Cartel, Escobar himself — and rarely shows us what that size means. We hear about 15 kilograms, then 50, then a network. The numbers climb and the stakes do not.
There is also the matter of what the film leaves soft. George’s mother calls the police on him and the movie barely pauses. Barbara dies and the movie moves on. The film is 124 minutes and still feels like it is skipping the parts that would hurt.
Blow is watchable, it is well cast, and it has a rise-and-fall shape that never stops being seductive. But watchable is not the same as good.
The Numbers on Blow
- Title: Blow (2001)
- Director: Ted Demme
- Writers: David McKenna, Nick Cassavetes
- Runtime: 124 minutes
- Genre: Crime, Drama
- Lead: Johnny Depp as George Jung
- Source book: Bruce Porter’s 1993 Blow: How a Small Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All
- Published critical score: 5.2/10 (Metacritic 52/100)
The published critical score for Blow sits at 5.2 out of 10, a Metacritic score of 52 out of 100. That is the right neighborhood. This is a film with a great cast, a strong first act, and a second half that keeps promising a fall it never fully stages. The Barbara storyline is the only part that earns its sadness. What is left is a long, glossy tour of a man who made a fortune and lost it, told without much interest in why either thing happened.
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