TV Reviews : Fiery Account of War Against Medellin Cartel

Although “based on true events,” NBC’s “Drug Wars II: The Cocaine Cartel” has dramatic license and composite character scrawled all over it like graffiti. Within its factual outline, reality and fantasy mingle confusingly.

At whatever cost to historical accuracy, however, its first of two parts, airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39, is a boiling caldron of suspense, a fiery account of efforts by the embattled Colombian government and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to destroy the powerful Medellin drug operation and its leaders.

This is also a story of personal courage, particularly on the part of Colombians who stood up to such murderous billionaire drug lords as Don Pablo Escobar Gaviria and Jose Rodriguez Gacha. These latter real-life villains are shown living in splendor and administering their sprawling illicit empire like a Fortune 500 company while DEA agents and Bogota authorities seeking to prosecute them often must operate from safe houses and concrete bunkers.

Enhanced by filming in Spain and Miami, Sunday brings two hours of mostly blazing material. Too bad that the fire all but goes out under Monday’s Part 2.

“Drug Wars II” is the docu-son of NBC’s “Drug Wars: The Camarena Story,” a 1990 account of the DEA’s investigation into the highly publicized torture and murder of one of its Mexico-based agents.

As in the earlier production, this one dresses DEA agents in heroism and adventurism. However, Julie Carmen all but steals Part 1 as Sonia Perez-Vega, a Colombian judge who bucks the cartel at great personal peril and gathers evidence against Escobar that leads to his criminal indictment and extradition to the United States. It’s a hot performance, and also sensitive, offering a delicate coexistence of bravery and terror within the same character.

Director Paul Krashy knows how to keep an audience on edge. One of his and Carmen’s best sequences comes when Perez-Vega travels to cartel-controlled Medellin and angrily confronts a flunky bank officer over records she seeks to confiscate as evidence against Escobar.

Perez-Vega is by far the most interesting figure emerging from this script by Gail Morgan Hickman and co-executive producer Gordon Greisman. Unfortunately, when she departs at the end of Part 1 (to resurface only briefly at the end of Part 2), most of the story’s vitality departs with her.

Part 2 becomes much more of a routine crime-and-cocaine epic, along the lines of executive producer Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice.” Frequent awkward forays into family problems of DEA agent Thomas Vaughan (Alex McArthur) bring the story to a screeching halt and Dennis Farina looms larger as a cocky DEA agent who snags the cartel in a giant sting.

Meanwhile, John Glover shows up as a colorful former drug smuggler said to be “loosely” based on, well, someone. And two scenes in particular are loosely written: (1) a cartel convoy of assassins is inexplicably allowed to withdraw after being discovered inside an army base housing Perez-Vega; (2) cartel assassins murder an army officer and his children but inexplicably spare his wife.

To its credit, “Drugs Wars II” does not pretend that the smashing of the Medellin group ended Colombia’s cocaine crisis. As it mentions, the fight against drugs continues. As does the fight against TV that, often cavalierly, merges fact and fiction.