Noriega: God's Favorite

When the previous ruler dies in a plane crash, General Noriega seizes control of Panama despite having a history of corruption and cruelty. With connections to both drug cartels and the CIA, Noriega is a typically small-time 'tin-pot dictator' who finds himself being forced out of power by those around him until he takes it by force. With a battle of words and might with the US, Noriega gradually finds himself out of his depth as he tries to get more and more of what he wants.

I didn't know anything about Noriega before I watched this movie – in fact if I had known less then I might have assumed that this was a biopic about an American rapper! However the film opens with a 'history for dummies' about Panama and Noriega that helps set the scene for a story that is very simplistic and liberal with the facts but is still fun and interesting to watch. The film sweeps across Noriega's connections with cartels and the US and focuses more on his character than anything else. The sweep of facts means that it is difficult to trust it and it is not a film to watch if you wish to be well informed but it seems to touch on the bullet points as a vague summary and I found it valuable to take in the basics and learn a little if not a lot. The film pitches the film with an amusing air and it follows this through into the title character.

Here Noriega is a character of some comedy but not totally played for laughs. He is greedy, corrupt and desperate and, as such, could easily be any similar ruler of a small country! The film paints this character for entertainment rather than education but at times it manages to adopt a serious enough tone to avoid just being a bit of fluff. In fact it also injects humour into the role the US plays in the country and it is none too flattering in its depiction of the CIA etc. This is not to say that this is very real because I doubt that this is the full story as it should be told but it is enough to do the job. Hoskins was a strange choice but he does it quite well and is responsible for good a good job mixing the humour with the serious side even if he doesn't give a performance so much as a caricature of a small time dictator! The support cast is mostly good and has quite a few familiar faces but the film pretty much belongs to Hoskins.

Overall not a great film if you are looking for a factual story that you will learn from but it is an entertaining film that has enough basis in fact to be interesting and to give you a good overview of the man's story. The amusing tone makes for an enjoyable story and, although not a great performance, Hoskins does well to mix the comic with the serious and produce a film that is interesting and entertaining and worth seeing as long as you come prepared for the fact that it is far from being a factual historic film.

This story of Noriega is an interesting mix of tragedy and comedy. It tells the story of a human monster who evidently just wanted love. Hoskins is wonderfully adept at capturing the odd combination of evil and humor needed to make such a strange story work.

The film also illustrates the way the US so often shoots itself in the foot by first supporting and then being betrayed by little tin gods -- and also betraying the people that we induce to fight the tin gods. Maybe we will learn the lesson someday, but not yet.

Noriega seems to be, indeed, God's favorite because he gets away with so much and never seems to be terribly scathed. Maybe Noriega is an example of God's sense of humor. If so, he validates the old saying that God works in strange ways -- or, in this case, laughs in strange ways.

This was a medium low budget, made for cable TV film. The emphasis and framing device are at least different from the usual "biopic". I cannot speak for the veracity of the film, although I do recall a fair amount of this stuff from when it was going on, particularly the invasion. The film glosses over the fact that it took a week or so to get Noriega to surrender from the papal nunciate, and that he negotiated a few small concessions in return. If the film was considered comedic, that largely escaped me. Interesting that johnnyb2000_ seems to think that the film would be more true to events if made by Oliver Stone! But he is correct that no one should try to get their history from a movie. Any movie. Bob Hoskins was odd casting for Noriega, but he seemed incapable of putting in a bad performance. Rosa Blasi was good as well. But overall, I can't really recommend this film.

The best of the film is the performance of Hoskins as Noriega although the life of the dictator shown here is partially an invention, particularly in the scenes where Noriega does things brutally. The success is that this movies clearly showed who created Noriega, dictator, his links with the Irangate and antisandinistas in Nicaragua, his deal with the drug cartels, and others. The film also tries to indicate some involvement of Noriega in the assassination of Torrijos.

Those expecting "Noriega: God's Favorite" to be a serious docudrama, biopic, or history lesson will likely be disappointed to find its representation of the reign of Noriega as Panama's evil thug dictator to be an embellished and peculiar mix of tongue-in-cheek drama and dark comedy which is surprisingly sympathetic to the title character. With the Philippines standing in for Panama much better than Hoskins standing in for the squat, pockmarked Noriega, the film goes off tangentially with seemingly little purpose save entertaining. The latter it appears to accomplish well in spite of it's made-for-tv low-budgetness and theatrical execution. Worth a look for those who don't mind filmdom playing with serious matters of history. (B-)