Finally a doco that jumps off the shelves at you saying ‘buy me, buy me!’ With the graffitied uzi on the cover it delivers its fair share of gung ho violence. What it doesn’t truly delivery is the first class raconteuring the production company claim they excel at.

Firstly a bit of background. This is a doco about the so called warlords of cocaine in Miami in the mid 70s to late 80s. Primarily the American pilots and the ruthless Colombians that fought perilously for their share. So far so good.

In fact the first half of Cocaine Cowboys is a veritable ‘everything you ever wanted to know about smuggling cocaine in the seventies’ style affair, which is genuinely compelling. Two convicted transporters, or pilots, talk in depth about how they communicated with drug cartels, what air and sea craft was used and other methods of drug transportation. There’s also a bit said about the Medellin Cartel, and how Pablo Escobar was not the numero uno he’s potrayed to be. A bit of a narcotics Mythbusters if you will.

To some extent, it’s a history lesson in how sleepy Miami was in the early seventies. Also how hifalutin cocaine still was to the masses, until everyone really got organised. Then came the bloodshed.

From this moment on, the Scarface style Latino gang bosses come into the picture. Primarily one such felon interviewed in prison who was the head bodyguard for one such gang boss. At this point, it’s hard to maintain the interest. There’s a constant pastiche of Latino thugs, money and violence. The felon must’ve talked for about 45 minutes. It should be far more compelling, but sadly it just doesn’t flow well enough. Although worth the price of admission alone to find out that the most brutal, feared gang boss in town was in fact a Latina!

Towards the end though the movie takes a turn into the subjective. Here claiming that Republican presidents Reagan and George HW Bush played an instrumental role in cleaning up Miami. While this may be true, the drug problem in the US is clearly still of epidemic proportions.

Ending on a positive, the subjects claim that the drug money of the eighties made the glitzy Miami of today. Which is all believable but for the fact that if you look at Top Gear’s American episode and Aussie Francis Gittoes documentary Rampage, some things never change. There are some truly bad areas in Miami to this day.

Brownie points go to the production crew for finding classic TV news footage of Steven Tyler coked off of his nut talking about the ‘new’ post coke wars Miami. That is as funny as hell. But it falls short of a truly awesome doco by getting too stuck into the accounts from one prisoner.

3 out of 5.