( Entertainment Weekly ) -- Over the last decade , Steven Soderbergh has taken the `` one for them , one for me '' concept of film-director politics to an almost comically programmatic extreme . Benicio Del Toro plays Ernesto `` Che '' Guevara in Steven Soderbergh 's biopic . Basically , he makes big-budget crowd-pleasers like the `` Ocean 's '' films , stuffed with movie stars and candied gimcrack fun , and between them he makes whatever oddball labor-of-love doodle ( the enticing `` Bubble , '' the dreadful `` Solaris '' ) enters his head . What 's disorienting about `` Che , '' his two-part , four-hour-and-17-minute , studiously eccentric drama about the revolutionary life and times of Ernesto `` Che '' Guevara , is that it 's almost a knowing brainteaser on Soderbergh 's part to force you to figure out which category the film belongs to . Che cost a reported $ 65 million to make , it 's full of exacting panoramas of strategy and combat set in the mountainous jungles of Cuba and Bolivia , and its hero is a figure who -- 41 years after his violent death -- remains so loved , hated , and mythologized that he fits into an epic drama timed for awards season as perfectly as Gandhi or Ray Charles ever did . Following a one-week Oscar-qualifying run , `` Che '' is now rolling out to major American cities , where it is likely to draw generations of filmgoers who 've either worn Che on their T-shirts or have the honest curiosity to wonder : Who was this man before he became a Warhol-worthy icon of radical chic ? In `` Che , '' Soderbergh stokes that curiosity , feeds it , and frustrates it , all at the same time . He 's made a film that embraces the romance of revolution only to shake it off , leaving very little in its place . The first half of `` Che '' is a genuine achievement . It picks up Guevara ( Benicio Del Toro ) in 1955 , when he was a clean-cut Argentine physician who dreamed of uniting Latin America through armed struggle . At a dinner party in Mexico City , he meets Fidel Castro -- played , with perfect domineering gesticulations , by Demian Bichir -- and the movie follows these two into the Cuban countryside , where they assemble the nuts and bolts of a revolution . Soderbergh exhibits a tinkerer 's fascination with how it all worked , embedding each scene with a docu-nugget of information . We see Che taming his asthmatic coughing fits or reading books between battles , and learn how a battalion of rebels could defeat a platoon three times its size ( with surprise , daring , and Molotov cocktails ) . Che is by turns scholar , guidance counselor , drill sergeant , and comandante , and Del Toro makes him a warrior-saint who learns , against his will , to cultivate a gruff bruiser facade . He yearns to be a `` true revolutionary , the highest level of humanity , '' and it 's no insult to the film to say that Soderbergh and Del Toro succeed in portraying Che as a kind of T-shirt in three dimensions , a Guerrilla for All Seasons . But that 's when things get strange , if not monumentally perverse . At the end of Part I -- the victory of the Cuban rebels -- my appetite was whetted to learn even more about Che , in particular how his humane ideals were tested , and compromised , by the Castro regime as it edged toward dictatorship . Instead , Part II leaps forward to 1966-67 , when Che led the revolutionary war in Bolivia , and here 's the thing : It turns out to be the same damn movie . Only in this dispirited rerun , the revolution does n't take . The rebels , all squabbling ego , can barely summon the will to sacrifice and die , and the peasants have little belief that this ragtag crew is bringing a better world . Even with the U.S. poking its nose into the region , the Soviet Union wo n't back an insurrection . Soderbergh has built `` Che '' conceptually , as two giant panels of war , and his message is about the doomed destiny of Marxism . Che , like Marx , believed that the rise of the proletariat was inevitable -- the unstoppable tide of history -- but as the movie reveals , he was wrong . Che did n't ride a wave of history ; instead , it crashed down on him . By remaining the same , he becomes , in Part II , a distant and deluded figure whose dream evaporates around him . As political theater , `` Che '' moves from faith to impotence , which is certainly a valid reading of Communism in the 20th century . Yet as drama , that makes the second half of the film borderline deadly . Che does n't grow richer , deeper , or reveal any contradictions ; he just gets more abstract -- a symbol of idealism too pure for this world . Che is twice as long as it needs to be , but it is also only half the movie it should have been . EW Grades : Part I : B+ , Part II : C. CLICK HERE to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly . Copyright 2009 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved .
`` Che '' has a brilliant first half , but second half is repetitious , says EW . Steven Soderbergh 's four-hour film is trying to make a point , but loses steam . However , Benicio Del Toro is terrific as famed Marxist revolutionary .