When Che: Part Two gets underway, it’s 1965 and Guevara has already tried to export the Cuban experiment to Congo and Venezuela. Under an assumed identity, he travels to Bolivia, where he’s confronted by young, undisciplined troops, an unreliable and suspicious peasantry, inhospitable terrain and well-trained military opponents aided by Vietnam-tested U.S. advisers. With the emerald greens and deep shadows of Cuba giving way to the sere, colorless Bolivian scrub, even the landscape seems to have turned against Guevara, who makes his wheezing, asthmatic way to his capture and execution as if in a death foretold.
True to his restrained, unemphatic style, Soderbergh resists all calls to melodrama during Guevara’s final moments. Still, as dispassionate as Che seems to be in simply focusing on what Guevara did, there’s no doubt where Soderbergh’s sympathies lie. From scenes of Guevara insisting that new recruits learn to read, to Del Toro’s unfailingly gentle portrayal of a man in love with ‘humanity, justice and truth,’ their Guevara hews much closer to the humanist martyr of Korda’s iconic photograph than the man known as a murderer and assassin by his detractors.
– Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
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