Arriving from Canada with his older brother and his brother’s girlfriend, Nick settles down on a beach in Colombia. His dream: to open a surfing school in one of the world’s last bits of paradise. But then he meets the beautiful Maria, with whom he falls in love, and without knowing it Nick joins the entourage of her uncle, the very popular Pablo Escobar. When the country descends into civil war, Nick discovers the monster that lies behind the man…

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14 years after winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his roles in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Benicio Del Toro returns to the merciless world of drugs, switching sides to play the legendary Pablo Escobar, both hero and villain of Italian actor Andrea Di Stefano’s directorial debut. A deliberate performance within the heart of the movie, as witnessed by its poster, but one that in the end gets a bit lost behind a story that prefers to style itself as a Hollywood thriller instead of an in-depth portrait of the drug kingpin. The structure is reminiscent of The Last King of Scotland, starring future Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin Dada, who lurked ominously in the background as the movie centered on a classic protagonist. The same is the case with Paradise Lost, which adheres to all the rules of the genre but plays with its codes, resulting in a very solid film that proves that Josh Hutcherson, washed out in The Hunger Games, is able to carry a movie by himself.