Olivier Assayas’s extraordinary 330-minute epic about international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sanchéz—better known by his nom de guerre, Carlos the Jackal—is one of the most immersive biopics in cinema history. Spanning 20 years and taking place in a dozen countries, Carlos begins in 1973 in Beirut, where our antihero is a soldier for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Soon he’s dispatched on assignments to London, the Hague, and Paris, killing, raiding, and exploding as the situation requires. Fueled by equal parts Marxist-revolutionary fervor and boundless narcissism, Carlos proudly boasts to one of his many girlfriends, “Weapons are an extension of my body.” Assayas masterfully depicts his subject’s most infamous missions—including seizing control of the 1975 OPEC summit meeting in Vienna, the film’s centerpiece—with assiduous, electrifying attention to detail, giving viewers the sense that they are in the middle of the action. But Assayas is just as specific when chronicling Carlos’s outrageous downfall: it turns out that this Marxist zealot had quite a taste for bourgeois pleasures—and is finally arrested at, of all places, a urologist’s office.
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