Cannes reaction Early reviews were mixed, although there were several critics who spoke glowingly of the project.
Cinematical James Rocchi described the biopic as "expressive, innovative, striking, and exciting" as well as "bold, beautiful, bleak and brilliant". Rocchi went on to brand it "a work of art" that's "not just the story of a revolutionary" but "a revolution in and of itself". Columnist and critic Jeffrey Wells proclaimed the film "brilliant", "utterly believable", and "the most exciting and far-reaching film of the Cannes Film Festival". In further praise, Wells referred to the film as "politically vibrant and searing" while labeling it a "perfect dream movie". Todd McCarthy was more mixed in his reaction to the film in its present form, describing it as "too big a roll of the dice to pass off as an experiment, as it's got to meet high standards both commercially and artistically. The demanding running time forces comparison to such rare works as
Lawrence of Arabia,
Reds and other biohistorical epics. Unfortunately,
Che doesn't feel epic—just long". Anne Thompson wrote that Benicio del Toro "gives a great performance", but predicted that "it will not be released stateside as it was seen here". Peter Bradshaw, in his review for
The Guardian, wrote, "Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director's flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured—the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first—and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che's interior world". In his less favorable review for
Esquire, Stephen Garrett criticized the film for failing to show Guevara's negative aspects, "the absence of darker, more contradictory revelations of his nature leaves Che bereft of complexity. All that remains is a South American superman: uncomplex, pure of heart, defiantly pious and boring".
Richard Corliss had problems with Del Toro's portrayal of Guevara: "Del Toro—whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof—is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here ... Che is defined less by his rigorous fighting skills and seductive intellect than by his asthma". In his review for
Salon.com, Andrew O'Hehir praised Soderbergh for making "something that people will be eager to see and eager to talk about all over the world, something that feels strangely urgent, something messy and unfinished and amazing. I'd be surprised if
Che doesn't win the
Palme d'Or ... but be that as it may, nobody who saw it here will ever forget it". Soderbergh replied to the criticism that he made an unconventional film: "I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people ... upset that something's not conventional. The bottom line is we're just trying to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out around this person. That's really it. And the scenes were chosen strictly on the basis of, 'Yeah, what does that tell us about his character?. According to Dargis, "Che wins, Che loses, but Che remains the same in what plays like a procedural about a charismatic leader, impossible missions and the pleasures of work and camaraderie", referring to the "historical epic" as "''
Ocean's Eleven with better cigars". In his review for UGO'', Keith Uhlich wrote, "The best to say about Del Toro's Cannes-honored performance is that it's exhausting—all exterior, no soul, like watching an android run a gauntlet [sic] (one that includes grueling physical exertions, tendentious political speechifying, and risible
Matt Damon cameos)".
Slant Magazine gave
Che two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "The problem is that, despite his desire to sidestep Hollywood bio-hooey, the director is unable to turn his chilly stance into an ideological perspective, like
Roberto Rossellini did in his demythologized portraits of
Louis XIV,
Garibaldi and
Pascal". In his review for
Salon.com magazine, Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "What Soderbergh has sought to capture here is a grand process of birth and extinguishment, one that produced a complicated legacy in which
John McCain,
Barack Obama, and
Raúl Castro are still enmeshed. There will be plenty of time to argue about the film's (or films') political relevance or lack thereof, to call Soderbergh names for this or that historical omission, for this or that ideological error. He's made something that people will be eager to see and eager to talk about all over the world, something that feels strangely urgent, something messy and unfinished and amazing".
Miami screening and protest On 4 December 2008,
Che premiered at
Miami Beach's Byron Carlyle Theatre, as part of the
Art Basel Festival. Taking place only a few miles from
Little Havana, which is home to the United States' largest
Cuban American community, the invitation-only screening was met with angry demonstrators. The organization Vigilia Mambisa, led by Miguel Saavedra, amassed an estimated 100 demonstrators to decry what they believed would be a favorable depiction of Guevara. Saavedra told reporters from the
El Nuevo Herald that "you cannot offend the sensitivities of the people", while describing the film as "a disgrace". A supporter of the demonstration,
Miami Beach's mayor
Matti Herrera Bower, lamented that the film was shown, while declaring "we must not allow dissemination of this movie". For his part, Soderbergh later stated that "you have to separate the
Cuban nationalist lobby that is centered in Miami from the rest of the country".
Cuban homecoming On 7 December 2008,
Che premiered at
Havana's 5,000+ person
Karl Marx Theater as part of the
Latin American Film Festival. Benicio Del Toro, who was in attendance, referred to the film as "Cuban history", while remarking that "there's an audience in there ... that could be the most knowledgeable critics of the historical accuracy of the film". After unveiling
Che in Havana's Yara Cinema, Del Toro was treated to a 10-minute standing ovation from the 2,000+ strong audience, many of whom were involved in the revolution.
New York City debut On 12 December 2008,
Che was screened at New York City's sold out 1,100 person
Ziegfeld Theater. Upon seeing the first image on the screen (a silhouette of Cuba), the crowd erupted into a raucous cry of "¡Viva, Cuba!" Following the film, and the standing ovation it received, Soderbergh appeared for a post program Q&A. During the sometimes contentious conversation with the audience, in which Soderbergh alternated between defensiveness and modesty, the director categorized Guevara as "a hardass", to which one audience member yelled out, "Bullshit, he was a murderer!" Del Toro then visited the state-run
Villa del Cine, a film production facility President Chávez launched to help
Venezuela produce its own movies as an alternative to what Chávez calls
Hollywood's cultural imperialism. Del Toro described
Che as "a totally Latin American movie" and stated that he had "a good meeting with the President".
General reviews Part One has a 68% approval rating at
Rotten Tomatoes, based on 142 reviews, and an average rating of 6.5/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Though lengthy and at times plodding, Soderbergh's vision and Benicio Del Toro's understated performance ensure that
Che always fascinates." Meanwhile,
Part Two has a 79% rating, based on 52 reviews, with an average rating of 6.7/10. The website's critical consensus states, "The second part of Soderbergh's biopic is a dark, hypnotic and sometimes frustrating portrait of a warrior in decline, with a terrific central performance from Del Toro.". On
Metacritic, the film has a collective weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Scott Foundas of the
LA Weekly proclaimed
Che "nothing if not the movie of the year". In his review for the
Village Voice,
J. Hoberman wrote, "At its best,
Che is both action film and ongoing argument. Each new camera setup seeks to introduce a specific idea—about Che or his situation—and every choreographed battle sequence is a sort of algorithm where the camera attempts to inscribe the event that is being enacted". Hoberman compared Soderbergh's directing style and "non-personalized" historical approach on the film to
Otto Preminger's observational use of the moving camera, or one of
Roberto Rossellini's "serene" documentaries. In his review for
The New York Times,
A.O. Scott writes, "Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though,
Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale". Sheri Linden, in her review for the
Los Angeles Times, wrote, "in this flawed work of austere beauty, the logistics of war and the language of revolution give way to something greater, a struggle that may be defined by politics but can't be contained by it". In her review for
The Washington Post,
Ann Hornaday wrote, "The best way to encounter
Che is to let go of words like 'film' and 'movie', words that somehow seem inadequate to the task of describing such a mesmerizing, fully immersive cinematic experience. By the end of
Che, viewers will likely emerge as if from a trance, with indelibly vivid, if not more ambivalent feelings about Guevara, than the bumper-sticker image they walked in with".
Entertainment Weekly gave a "B+" rating to the first half of the film and a "C−" rating to the second half, and
Owen Gleiberman wrote, "As political theater,
Che moves from faith to impotence, which is certainly a valid reading of Communism in the 20th century. Yet as drama, that makes the second half of the film borderline deadly ...
Che is twice as long as it needs to be, but it is also only half the movie it should have been". James Verniere of
The Boston Herald gave the film a B−, describing the work as a new genre of "
arthouse guerrilla nostalgia", while lamenting
Che as the film version of
Alberto Korda's iconic 1960 photograph
Guerrillero Heroico. In Verniere's view, so much information was missing that he recommended one first see
The Motorcycle Diaries to fill in the background. In her review for
USA Today,
Claudia Puig wrote, "With its lyrical beauty and strong performances, the film can be riveting. Its excessive length and rambling scenes also make it maddening. It is worth seeing for its attention to visual detail and ambitious filmmaking, but as a psychological portrait of a compelling historical figure, it is oddly bland and unrevealing".
Anthony Lane, in his review for
The New Yorker, wrote, "for all the movie's narrative momentum,
Che retains the air of a study exercise—of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one's total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie?" Taking a more positive stance, film critic Chris Barsanti compared
Che to a "guerrilla take on
Patton", calling it "an exceptionally good"
war film, which rivaled
The Battle of Algiers in its "you-are-there sensibility".
Roger Ebert awarded the film 3.5 out of 4 stars and addressed the film's length: "You may wonder if the film is too long. I think there's a good reason for its length. Guevara's experience in Cuba and especially Bolivia was not a series of events and anecdotes but a trial of endurance that might almost be called mad".
Film Comment ranked
Che as the 22nd-best film of 2008 in their "Best Films of 2008" poll. Film critics
Roger Ebert, and James Rocchi went further, naming
Che one of the best films of 2008. The film appeared on several critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008. Looking back at the experience of making
Che, Soderbergh has said that he now wishes that he had not made the film and remarked, "Literally I'd wake up and think, 'At least I'm not doing that today. The director blamed
piracy for the film's financial failure and felt that "It's a film that, to some extent, needs the support of people who write about films. If you'd had all these guys running around talking in accented English you'd [have got] your head taken off". ==Awards==