Main cast: Johnny Depp (George Jung), Penélope Cruz (Mirtha), Jordi Mollà (Diego Delgado), Franka Potente (Barbara), Rachel Griffiths (Ermine Jung), Ray Liotta (Fred Jung), Ethan Suplee (Tuna), Paul Reubens (Derek Foreal), Max Perlich (Kevin Dulli), Cliff Curtis (Escobar), Miguel Sandoval (Augusto Oliveras), Kevin Gage (Leon Minghella), and Jaime King (Kristina Jung)
Director: Ted Demme

Blow makes one great contribution to the movie business: it exposing how dreadfully dull a drug dealer can be. Based on Bruce Porter’s biography of the most successful American drug dealer in the late 1970s, George Jung, this one just, well, blows in its long-winded, dull narrative style.

It’s about the rise and fall of George Jung, and how towards the end he is trying to juggle between keeping the affections of his dearest daughter Kristina and keeping out of the clutches of the law. Throughout his career, he had imported allegedly 85% of all cocaine in America. Is that cool or what? But it’s also the sad, sad story of young Jung whose screwed-up parents made him this way, boo-hoo. And Jung’s sleeping with the honeys and smoking joints and snorting it all with his homies.

Yet after the initial interesting opening scene about cocaine harvesting, the story soon starts to plod. Characters come and go, scenes come and go, everything seems haphazard and there seems to be no focus, no direction, not even a clear theme of the story. And most fatal of all, George Jung isn’t an interesting character to begin with. A whiner who thinks the world revolves around him, he is never given any depths. I finish the movie wondering how this bore can actually get a movie made about him.

I mean, look at it this way: George Jung may be a drug dealer, but that’s all he is – a drug dealer. Not a drug manufacturer, and certainly not a member of a Mafia or something. Watching whom he boink and whom he snort coke with in an endless parade of monotony is as fun as watching paint on a wall dry.