"Carlos The Jackal - The Man Who Hijacked the World"

[Elano]

Follows the life of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan-born leftist revolutionary nicknamed Carlos and later Jackal who famously raided the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, Austria, in 1975. Known as the real life "anti-James Bond," Ilich worked for radical Palestinians and groups in Syria, Libya, Iraq and communist Romania. Manipulated by the secret services of Arabian and eastern countries, he founded a worldwide terrorist organization and ended up ridiculed and alone in exile in Sudan before being picked up by French police.

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[Elano]

The Days, Nights and Years of the Jackal: The Tale of a Terrorist

About 15 minutes into “Carlos,” Olivier Assayas’s excited, exciting, epic dramatization about the international terrorism brand known as Carlos the Jackal, the title character takes a long, loving, vainglorious look in the mirror at his naked body. It’s 1974 and after a bungled assassination attempt and an ineffectual bombing, Carlos has just headed down the flamboyant career path — riddled with bodies, rutted by explosions and festooned with publicity — that will inspire pulp fictions, detailed biographies, hyperventilated conspiracy theories and lasting myths. As he luxuriates in his own image, you see how Carlos saw himself: the terrorist as pinup.

Pinup, playboy, international man of murder and mystery, the real Carlos the Jackal was keenly image-conscious, partial to suits that, when the cameras rolled, he traded for a black leather jacket and Che-style beret. He had swollen cheeks and eyes as small as BBs, with none of the obvious attractions of Édgar Ramírez, the pretty Venezuelan actor who, as the years pass, first plays him sleek as a panther and later lumbering with fat. The disparity between the original and copy might have been necessary to finance a 330-minute look back at a moldering terrorist, but a glammed-up Carlos also allows Mr. Assayas to get close to the character, showing you the idealist-turned-mercenary in his self-regarding element as the filmmaker takes the longer, cooler, intellectual view.

Bigger than life if smaller than his persona, Carlos the Jackal entered the world stage in 1949 as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the eldest son of a Venezuelan lawyer and Marxist whose admiration for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was so fierce that he named his other sons Vladimir and Lenin.

After being schooled in the Soviet Union and in the battlefields of the Middle East in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ilich Ramírez joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an extremist group for which he carried out spectacular and spectacularly botched operations. Mr. Assayas, hewing close if not slavishly to the extant record, lines up his facts with care, even as he puts his own spin on the story.

To that end, the movie takes off with a soft caress and hard bang in 1973 with a Popular Front operative leaving his lover in bed and being blown to bits in a car on a Parisian street, a prelude to the oppositional dynamics to come. The black-and-white news footage that follows sets the context as a voice-over speculates that the bomb might have been the work of the Israeli secret service, in retaliation for the murderous attack on Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics. From there it’s a hop, skip and abrupt cut to Lebanon, where Carlos meets a leader of the Popular Front, Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour), offering up his warrior bona fides in one of the few awkward expository passages in the generally sharp script by Mr. Assayas and Dan Franck.

(Shot in digital and made for French television, “Carlos” is being released in American theaters in two editions: The three-part, 5 ½-hour version has played on the Sundance Channel, while the gutted two-hour-and-45-minute cut will be available on Wednesday through video on demand.)

After Carlos signs on with the Popular Front, he joins forces with radical zealots and together they zigzag across Europe and the Middle East, racking up victims and notoriety. Mr. Assayas’s fast pans and jump-cuts create an almost frenzied sense of history inexorably hurtling forward, even as the character at the center of this ferment sometimes seems scarcely as motivated. Carlos might be an ideologue as well as a braggart — “You may have heard of me,” he announces to some hostages — but his rhetoric has none of the passion of his violence. Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes.


Part richly conceived time capsule, part intentionally blurred biopic (Mr. Assayas is too smart to try to solve the riddle of this sphinx), “Carlos” is of its self-conscious historical moment and ours, notably in its consideration of what might inspire an idealist to pick up a gun. Early on in London, Ilich meets one of his lovers (Juana Acosta), who chides him for missing a protest march against the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet. “Words get us nowhere,” Ilich responds, just before they’re seated in a white-tablecloth restaurant with blood-red walls. “It’s time for action.” Invoking the Vietcong, Ilich says that he’s formed a group that he will lead to glory. “Bourgeois arrogance hidden behind revolutionary rhetoric,” the woman answers hotly as silverware gently clinks. Ilich scoffs and proclaims his nom de guerre: Carlos.

 He might not be one for dialectical engagement — like his Popular Front mentor, Carlos demands absolute loyalty — but Mr. Assayas, structuring his movie as an extended dialogue, is. It isn’t that Mr. Assayas doesn’t have strong opinions, only that because he wants to move beyond familiar axioms — Carlos the monster, Carlos the cool — he shows history as it’s happening, active and dynamic, rather than how it will be subsequently narrated. Those opinions come through forcefully and at times, with such bluntness, it can throw you. It’s no accident that the restaurant scene (in which Ilich says of his group, “We want to do good”) is followed with him tossing an explosive into an Israeli bank in Paris, the sounds of shattered glass and screams trailing in his wake.

Just as startling is the thrum of electric guitars revving up in the 1981 song “Dreams Never End,” by the postpunk band New Order, which accompanies Carlos as he throws the bomb and hurries away. The music feels dangerously off-putting at first because it’s unclear if Mr. Assayas is trying to sex up the violence, its perpetrator, both or neither. But as the guitars carry over into the next scene — a seemingly unremarkable yet crucial pause in the action in which Carlos listens to a report about the bombing and then clutches his genitals while gazing in a mirror — the music feels a lot less like an empty device, one used simply to pump the story, and more like the soundtrack you might expect to be playing inside the head of a world-class self-mythologizer like this one.

He wasn’t alone in creating that mythology, which was nurtured in a specific post-1968 context in which some on the left traded their ravaged idealism for nihilistic violence. In the movie, Carlos steps into the abyss created by the loss of political hope and fills it with blood and terror, playing to the faithful with anti-imperialist rhetoric and a pantomime of that old-time revolutionary feeling. It’s no wonder everyone wants a piece of him, dead or alive and sometimes on the payroll: warring governments, admiring partisans, bickering women. Any wonder, too, that Édgar Ramírez, in a performance that’s emotionally opaque and robustly physical, swaggers like a star only to end up chasing a child through a garden, much as Brando’s Godfather once did.

It all comes crashing to an end in 1994 in Sudan, both for Mr. Assayas, who runs out of steam, and for Carlos, who, stricken with a testicular pain, ends up clutching his genitals once more. This concluding chapter is something of a drag even if it completes the portrait. By then Carlos is seeking work with fundamentalist Iran and adrift in Sudan, looking every bloated inch like the bourgeois narcissist that his lover once accused him of being. He’s still playing with guns and talking about revolution, but the violence that turned Carlos on — which inspires him to kiss a gun, fondle a woman with a grenade and murder in the name of ideals — has finally blown up in his face.

[Episcop Cruel Cvrle]

There were few movies about The Jackal, anyone who likes this thematic should check the movie from 90s called : The Assignment, Aidan Quinn, Donald Shuterland and Ben Kingsley are great in this flick.

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[Elano]

i think this one is better...

[Episcop Cruel Cvrle]

i think this one is better...

Gonna check it when it comes out, no doubt. I remember when I first heard about this it was presented  as mini series 550 minutes long. Now I see they made a few version of this, 185 min movie that was released in Germany, 330 min movie presented at festivals, and 165 min movie version for UK.

Im going to wait for 550 min version.

[ICHI THE KILLER]

its cool movie nothing special tho