Del Toro mesmerising in 'Che - Part 1'

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Julia Ormond, Demian Bechir

Cert: 15

Soderbergh assumes, in his massive, four-hour bio, that you have worn the image of Ernesto Che Guevara on a T-shirt and pinned his iconic poster on a wall in your revolutionary youth … and brings us a character who is not as fully rounded as more youthful members of the audience might like.

Otherwise – and for the rest of us who do know that Che was the companion of Castro in the Cuban revolution that overthrew the dictator Baptista in the l950s – Soderbergh, certainly in the first part of his epic film, has fashioned a film of towering, and fully realised, ambition.

It is based partly on the memoirs of Che himself and is told in a no-nonsense, straightforward docu-drama manner that goes some way to capturing the central character in most of his many guises.

What makes the first part of Che such compulsive viewing – covering as it does the revolution – is the quite excellent performance of Del Toro as Che.

Del Toro does not merely portray Che he becomes him. He is ably assisted by Bechir as Castro in what is Soderbergh’s most ambitious and most successful film.

Star Rating: 4/5