Sofia Vergara rose from obscurity as a character actor to a major comedic actress in the sitcom Modern Family where her role could’ve been a one-joke trope as the younger wife to Ed O’Neill’s character. But as the show became a big hit through the 2010s, Vergara saw her career rise. And Vergara was nominated for many awards. Unfortunately her looks and her role on a comedy show had some people wondering if she has limited range.
Instead, she’s taken the route that Charlize Theron and Sharon Stone, and other actresses have done when they’re just dismissed as a pretty face. They instead decide to show they got real talent by making themselves as unattractive and/or as unlikeable as possible. In the Netflix limited series, Griselda, she plays Griselda Blanco, the infamous drug lord who moved from Colombia to Miami in a desperate way to start over. But she soon found herself climbing the ranks of the criminal underworld by any means necessary.
Unfortunately the series, which Vergara is credited as executive producer, tries to romanticize what Blanco did as a woman who was running from an abusive relationship. But she brought a kilo of cocaine hidden in her son’s luggage and she had killed her husband, basically leaving her target by Colombian drug runners. Yes, he was a bad guy and pimped her out. But two wrongs don’t make a right.
While I enjoyed Vergara’s performance, I felt the schedule was a little off at times. There’s another story consisting of a Miami-area police detective June Hawkins (Juliana Aiden Martinez), who at first was only used as a Spanish interpreter but soon finds herself one of the top crime officials tracking Griselda after the arrest of a major drug lord. The Hawkins story is never fully developed as it should be and it seems she just pops up from time to time. I guess they were trying to show the dichotomy of two Latino single mothers in south Florida and the separate paths they take.
Yet, no on is watching to see June Hawkins, even though Martinez does what she can with the role. There’s a few mentions of her son and he appears in only one scene. On the other hand, Griselda’s sons take up a lot of screen time. And like most movies and shows set over many years, they don’t seem to age even though they’re young. Also, I’m guessing the sons were used to make Griselda seem more human. But they were involved in the drug trade as some point.
This leads to a plot point where one of her associate’s accidentally has a son killed in an attempted drive-by. It is supposed to have an effect on Griselda. But there’s just one problem. Griselda wouldn’t have cared. The series tries to turn her into a Norma Rae of the cocaine trafficking underworld. She was in fact a ruthless person who killed and ordered to be killed anyone who stood in her way, even if it was women and children. She must’ve also known that by trafficking cocaine, it was going to eventually lead to people overdosing or resorting to crime themselves to fuel their drug habits.
Don’t get me wrong. There are some good scenes here. I liked how they would use women to traffic cocaine in their bras. And there are some big surprises as some of the associates with Griselda learn the hard way they shouldn’t been involved with the drug trade. Yet I felt like this is no different than 1983’s Scarface, Blow, or American Made. The same producers, Andres Baiz, Doug Miro and Ingrid Escajeda, behind Narcos which was about Pablo Escobar and the Medllin cartel, are involved in this series. And both Blow and American Made had Escobar as a supporting character.
The story starts from humble things to a slow rise and then the protagonist is on top of the world, before everything falls apart. And like most of these stories, the ending seems to come to quick that it seems rushed. However, the tidbit about Griselda’s top hitman, Jorge “Rivi” Ayala-Rivera (a nice sadistic role by Martin Rodriguez) having phone sex with aide’s of the Miami-Dade County District Attorney’s Office, is one of those stranger than fiction items that could’ve been expanded on. Yet it still works as a small plot point.
But this is Vergara’s baby and she does a damn good job. A lot of these series fudge the facts. And it only focuses on her rise from the late 1970s to her arrest in the mid-1980s with an epilogue. Actors love playing the villain and she is ruthless and diabolical in her role. However, I felt that at times, it wasn’t showing us anything we hadn’t seen before.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 