Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010)

Cobbled together from a much longer TV series, the cinematic version of the 'Carlos the Jackal' story still weighs in at near a hefty 3 hours. To its credit, it manages to work as cinema and keep rolling dramatically despite these limitations. Of course, having an abundance of fact-based extreme setpieces, right down to taking all the OPEC ministers hostage, makes Assayas's job a great deal easier, only having to join the dots.
He manages this reasonably well, with Edgar Ramirez as the revolutionary-come-nutjob for hire retaining pity and antipathy in equal measure as his bombast and botch-jobs produce less and less fruit until the unstavable downfall. But there are also no surprises in the director's trawl through whatever might have been real developments or meetings, and a frequent fall-back becomes characters chain-smoking moodily in place of actual characterisation.

5/10