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'Cartel Land' Goes Inside, But Gets Lost In The Complexities

courtesy The Orchard Movies

Cartel Land opens with surprising scenes of Mexican drug makers cooking up a batch of methamphetamine. The cookers use ordinary buckets along with stuff tossed into the buckets by the handful. On this day, when filmmaker Matthew Heineman had startling access to this drug gang at work, there's a real absence of science, or of measurement or any precision at all. A pinch of this, a handful of that, and – lo and behold! – you've got a load of meth. A batch that all these guys can get rich on and kill over.

This kind of material is the strength of Cartel Land, a documentary that still has some struggles.

The film shows things you probably never thought you'd see – like the offhand cooking of meth or captured men of the cartel that calls itself The Knights Templar pleading poverty as their excuse for plying this trade that's so damaging to human well-being.

The bigger interest of Cartel Land is the work of people on the other side. The rampant and violent drug trade in Mexico and Arizona has spawned a reaction among many citizens, who've organized themselves into defense forces to combat the drug cartels. While some may think of these people as vigilantes or terrorists, they think of themselves as heroes making the world safe for ordinary human beings, and this film tends to side with them. Cartel Land compares two such organizations – one Mexican and the other American. And nobody seems crazy.

The Mexican group is led by a doctor, Jose Manuel Mireles, a good-looking guy in his late 40s or early 50s, who is charismatic enough to draw crowds. He's organized the people of the town of Tepalcatepec in the state of Michoacán. According to the film, Mireles and his townspeople have pretty well erased the killings, rapes and intimidations of the Knights Templar.

In 2014, Mireles was injured in the crash of a small plane and later arrested by the Mexican police on weapons charges. Mireles points out that the government has yet to arrest any members of the Knights Templar.

On the American side, the vigilantes, if you want to call them that, have a stronger sense of themselves as soldiers. The Mexicans look pretty spontaneous in their dress; the Americans sport camouflage pants, night-vision goggles and walkie-talkies.

It's hard to read them. While the Mexicans seem effective in their drive to push the cartels out of town, the Americans seem to be on an illusory anti-immigrant project. They're uncomfortably like white supremacists, although it's hard to tell exactly where they're coming from.

And that's the problem with the film.

The footage is immediate, surprising and spontaneous. It's terrific, but the film as a whole seems unable to shape this material. The raw film could lead somewhere, but it's still unorganized. There's also too much drama added to the film that doesn't come from the subject – too much dramatic music, too many beautiful sunsets over the desert and too many pictures taken of the dark nighttime road beyond a truck's headlights. It makes you think "America's Most Wanted" and other unscripted, but well-manipulated TV versions of reality. It makes you lose trust in the movie.

Cartel Land doesn't come to grips with the complexities of what it shows. It doesn't pay enough attention to whether or not these groups are dangerous vigilantes or whether these are earnest people who have stepped in because government has failed.

The picture follows Jose Manuel Mireles as he comes on to a young woman riding in his car with him – and what's the point? Is womanizing part of the story, or is it just fun to watch?

Somebody needs to figure out what Cartel Land is about and then edit the film… and find a title that doesn't sound like a board game.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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