performance: the argentine

Want to spend an afternoon at the movies taking in a flawed epic about a revolutionary anti-hero? Steven Sodbergh's latest film, "Che", is being shown this week in New York on a special roadshow presentation in which audiences have the chance to see the two films, "The Argentine" and "Guerilla", shown back to back as one complete portrait of the controversial figure. Do you learn much more about him in this new imagining of his mythical life? Not exactly, but the four-plus-hour feast of a film coupling is an ambitious feat to be appreciated in its broad scope of a determined man bent on exacting change in the world. Benecio Del Toro is watchable in every frame and Soderbergh is an excellent cinematographer (credited under the guise of Peter Andrews), but the pacing loses its footing here and there and cameos from Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon are distracting. With a filmmaker whose career has included a major studio franchise (the "Ocean's" films), indie experiments ("Bubble"), and formalist driven personal projects (the misguided "Good German" and the sensationally underrated "Solaris"), Soderbergh is one to never bore you (well, I did catch a few winks during the overly long segment when Che was in the jungles of Bolivia), but I would recommend this to serious Del Toro and Soderbergh fans.