Cartel Land

Cartel Land

Image by Cartel Land

Daniel Nelson

A corny shot of headlights approaching the camera gives way to night-time meth-making and then Kathryn Bigelow’s name comes up as executive producer and you know you’re in for a rip-roaring ride.

Oscar-winner and Hollywood action film queen Bigelow – The Hurt Locker,  Zero Dark Thirty - doesn’t disappoint, though it’s courageous director Matthew Heineman who must take most credit for this gunblast of a film.

Cartel Land’s subject is Mexican and US vigilantes: the former fighting the ruthless, sadistic drug cartels who have terrorised their towns, the latter a bunch of survivalist-style paramilitaries trying to stem the flow of immigrants in an Arizona desert area known as Cocaine Alley. It calls itself a documentary, but it quacks like a Western.

The Mexican Autodefensas, a citizens’ posse determined to drive out the Knights Templar cartel, is led by Jose Mireles, “El Doctor”, who when he puts down his gun, is dispensing advice to mothers about their babies’ diarrhoea.

The small Arizona Border Recon group is led by Tim “Nailor” Foley, who if he were not real would be played by Clint Eastwood.

Initially, the black hats down Mexico way are unseen but their presence is felt, graphically described by a widow whose husband was blowtorched to death in front of her, after which she was forced to watch other men gruesomely killed before she was thrown into a pit with the bodies and assaulted. The drug-and alcohol-crazed desperados didn’t bother to murder her on the grounds that she was as good as dead because she would never be able to erase the vision of hell she had experienced.

It’s no surprise that when El Doctor drives into town with his big gun to mount the fight-back, he gets plenty of support.

No surprise, either, that when El Doctor’s gung-ho, revenge-fuelled gunmen track down the cartel mobsters and dish out rough justice all the emphasis is on the first word rather than the second. There’s no question of handing the Knights Templar to the authorities, who are regarded as corrupt as – and probably in league with – the cartels. No surprise, either, that though the film steers you into a position of some sympathy for Mireles - and indeed Foley, prowling the desert for desperate migrants - it’s not long before the  Autodefensas’ Mad Max aggression begins to look, to the townspeople caught in the crossfire, like the behaviour of the criminals they set out to destroy.

The fascinating unravelling of the moral ambiguities and the blurring of the lines between good and bad are played out against manic action and fantastic story twists, complete with betrayals, morphing alliances, a near-fatal helicopter crash, a laughably obvious love affair, deeply personal to-camera revelations. This is what happens when law and order break down and armed men take over, to thumping music and vivid cinematography.

“As we say in Mexico, he has balls,” says someone of El Doctor, though outmanoeuvred and double-crossed there’s less strut in his style as he is forced to flee, filming a last message to be played if he is caught and killed. Heineman’s got cojones, too, coming under fire during an anti-cartel raid and  watching Breaking Bad-like meth labs in the desert darkness and has produced a gripping glimpse into a terrifying world.

 

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