--- title: "Che: Part Two" year: 2008 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/che-part-two" fi1m_id: "che-part-two" imdb_id: "tt0374569" tmdb_id: 8880 wikidata_id: "Q1068674" fi1m_score: 76 critics_score: 74 critics_reviews: 7 published: "2026-09-09" updated: "2026-09-18T08:37:54.077677+00:00" region: "ES" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Che: Part Two (2008) Directed by Steven Soderbergh · 2h 15m · Drama, History, War ## Identity Che: Part Two - **Canonical:** https://film.one/film/che-part-two - **Type:** Film - **Fi1m ID:** che-part-two - **IMDb ID:** tt0374569 - **TMDB ID:** 8880 - **Wikidata ID:** Q1068674 - **Same entity:** https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374569/, https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/8880, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1068674 **Fi1m score: 76** · Critics 74 from 7 reviews *In a sentence:* A man leaves the best job in the revolution to go and starve in somebody else’s forest > Soderbergh’s account of Che Guevara’s Bolivian campaign is exact, patient and refuses to explain anything, and Benicio del Toro is quietly remarkable in it. It is a good film that asks more of your evening than most and does not always repay the middle hour. ## Synopsis Havana, 1965. Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) reads out a letter in which Ernesto Che Guevara (Benicio del Toro) gives up his posts and his Cuban citizenship to fight elsewhere. A year later Guevara arrives in Bolivia under a false name, disguised as a middle-aged businessman, and joins a small group of Cuban veterans at a remote farm in the south-east. The plan is to raise a guerrilla army among the peasants and miners, with the help of the Bolivian Communist Party. The party declines. The peasants are wary. Steven Soderbergh’s film follows the column through 1967, as recruits arrive and desert, supplies run short, and the Bolivian army, advised by the Americans, begins to close in. ## Review Steven Soderbergh’s second *Che* film opens in Havana in 1965, with Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) reading out a letter in which Ernesto Che Guevara gives up everything the Cuban revolution had given him and leaves to start again somewhere else. Somewhere else is Bolivia. Guevara (Benicio del Toro) arrives in La Paz a year later as a balding businessman, joins a handful of Cuban veterans at a farm in the south-east and waits for a revolution that never gets going. The film runs 135 minutes and Soderbergh’s decision is to show the campaign day by day and not to explain it. It is a good film and a stubborn one. If you want to know why a man walks away from a ministry to starve in a forest, it will not say. The script, credited to Peter Buchman, Benjamin A. Van Der Veen and, to our surprise, Terrence Malick, keeps close to Guevara’s own campaign diary. We admired that. We also spent a stretch around the hour mark wanting something, anything, to happen, and we suspect Soderbergh would say that is roughly how the men in the column felt. Soderbergh shot it himself, in greens and browns. The camera stays with the guerrillas, hand-held, at shoulder height, and the horizon is rarely in the frame. The skirmishes are short, confusing and over, and Pablo Zumárraga cuts them without slow motion or a shot that tells you who is winning; you count the bodies afterwards. Alberto Iglesias’s score is a few strings that arrive late and leave early. Antxón Gómez gives the camp a tin-roofed farmhouse and an oven dug into a bank, and Bina Daigeler’s fatigues start clean and end in rags without anyone saying a word about it. Del Toro spends most of the film listening. Early on, the leader of the Bolivian Communist Party comes to tell him the party will not help, and del Toro says almost nothing while the campaign dies in front of him. With the two visitors from outside, Régis Debray (Marc-André Grondin) and Ciro Bustos (Gastón Pauls), he is patient and dry. The moment that got at us was smaller. Guevara has run out of asthma medicine, and he sits against a tree while the column waits, and del Toro breathes as though each breath has to be argued for. We forgot he was famous and worried that he was ill. Carlos Bardem’s Moisés Guevara brings recruits down from the mines and half of them do not last a month. Cristian Mercado’s Inti is the one local who believes. Eduard Fernández’s Ciro Algarañaz, the farmer next door, decides the strangers must be making cocaine, which is the funniest thing in the film and does them no good at all. The peasants, asked for food and silence, give a little of the first and none of the second. Joaquim de Almeida’s President Barrientos gets a handful of scenes with American advisers, and Soderbergh shoots the government in the same flat daylight as the guerrillas. Nobody is lit as a villain. Because Soderbergh will not explain, the middle hour repeats itself: march, hunger, argument, march. Most critics have said so, though the more admiring ones take the repetition as the point. We half agree. The skirmishes are indistinguishable on purpose, but a film can be right about tedium and still be tedious, and there are twenty minutes here where the discipline looks like a shrug. How it ends is a matter of record. We will not describe how Soderbergh stages it, except to say that he does not change his method for it, and that we were glad. [*Che: Part One*](https://film.one/film/che-part-one) had a war that was won. This one has a greener country, a smaller band and a man walking towards something everyone in the audience knows about. It stands on its own, and we think it is the better film. It is a 15 certificate and the violence is brief and unglamorous. Watch it with a meal already inside you. It is a hungry film, and it makes you notice. *Fi1m score 76, published 9 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics agree on what Che: Part Two is doing and split on whether it is worth the effort. The praise clusters around Benicio del Toro, whose quiet, unshowy performance is singled out again and again, and around Soderbergh’s refusal of biopic habits: no psychology, no speeches, just the daily grind of a failing campaign reconstructed with unusual care. The reservations cluster just as tightly. A large share of the reviews find the film emotionally flat, the marches tedious and the skirmishes hard to tell apart, and several say the fastidiousness leeches the drama out of the story. The spread is moderate rather than wide; nobody dismisses it, but a good number stop short of recommending it. Variety, writing from the festival, is the harshest, arguing neither half stands alone and the whole offers more aggravation than reward. The Guardian and The Skinny take the opposite view, finding Part Two the more coherent and affecting of the pair. ## Straight answers **Is Che: Part Two worth watching?** *Che: Part Two* is worth watching for anyone with the patience for a war film that refuses to explain its hero, and we scored it 76. Benicio del Toro is quietly remarkable as Guevara, and Soderbergh shows the Bolivian campaign day by day, but the middle hour repeats itself and the film asks more of your evening than most. **How long is Che: Part Two, and what is it rated?** *Che: Part Two* runs 2h 15m. It is a drama and history film. **Where can I watch Che: Part Two in Spain?** *Che: Part Two* is streaming on Amazon Prime Video in Spain, and it is also available to rent from Amazon Prime Video from €2.99. Availability is checked daily; the links above go straight to each service. **How violent or frightening is Che: Part Two, and is it suitable for children?** *Che: Part Two* is a 15 certificate, and the violence is brief and unglamorous: short, confusing skirmishes with no slow motion, and you count the bodies afterwards. It is not frightening so much as grim, with hunger and illness weighing more than gunfire. It is unsuitable for children, and younger teenagers will find little to hold them. **How does Che: Part Two compare to The Battle of Algiers?** *Che: Part Two* and [*The Battle of Algiers*](https://film.one/film/the-battle-of-algiers) are both insurgency films shot like news footage, with the same refusal to cheer for anyone. Pontecorvo's film is the more gripping and lucid of the two, though it spends too little time with the people caught up in the fighting. Soderbergh's is slower, greener and more patient, staying with one man in a failing column, and it suits viewers who can take a stretch of tedium as part of the point. **What should I watch after Che: Part Two?** After *Che: Part Two*, try [*The Battle of Algiers*](https://film.one/film/the-battle-of-algiers) (1966, Fi1m 93): Pontecorvo’s insurgency film, shot like news footage, with the same refusal to cheer. Then [*The Motorcycle Diaries*](https://film.one/film/the-motorcycle-diaries) (2004, Fi1m 77): The young Guevara on the road, for anyone who wants the man before the beret; and [*Memories of Underdevelopment*](https://film.one/film/memories-of-underdevelopment) (1968, Fi1m 84): Havana after the revolution, seen by a man who stayed and cannot decide why. ### Reviews we read (15) - **The AV Club**, Keith Phipps (A-): Soderbergh emphasizes observation over ideology with an eye toward the mundane details of life on the front lines of a revolution, building to a thrilling climax in the first half and a kind of grace in the second. The film renders Guevara as an undemonstratively magnetic figure driven by his convictions. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/che-1798205373) - **Empire**, Andrew Male (80/100, inferred): The critic views the film as a grim, melancholic depiction of Guevara's failed Bolivian campaign, marked by hunger and defeat. They single out Benicio Del Toro's quiet and magisterial performance for praise, especially in a tense persuasion scene. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/che-part-two-review/) - **Time Out**, David Jenkins (4/5): Part Two stands alone effectively as Soderbergh's study of Che Guevara's failed 1966 Bolivian campaign. It highlights the director's focus on the realities of revolutionary struggle and Benicio del Toro's restrained performance, while noting that the film's academic tone and emphasis on source material details can sometimes hinder dramatic flow. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/che-part-two) - **Slant Magazine** (2.5/4): Soderbergh’s professed neutrality toward Guevara’s life and times succeeds mostly in leeching the emotion out of them, resulting in a work of intelligent fastidiousness rather than vivid inspiration. Part Two traces the leader’s ultimately doomed attempt to bring the revolution to the rest of Latin America as a death march. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/che/) - **Los Angeles Times**, Sheri Linden: The film rebels against biopic conventions by focusing on the rigors and specifics of armed struggle rather than psychological drama. It is an extraordinary, challenging work that favors action and strategy over emotional aha moments. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-dec-12-et-che12-story.html) - **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw: The second part works better on its own as a coherent, mysterious evocation of Che's final doomed campaign in Bolivia. Soderbergh's austere, experimental approach shows only the outer man and avoids conventional character insight or cliché. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/feb/20/film-review-che-part-two-steven-soderbergh-benicio-del-toro) - **The Hollywood Reporter**: The two-part biopic is a highly worthwhile, professionally accomplished project that informs viewers but in its obsessive devotion to precise documentation forgets to inspire. Part Two, focusing on the failed Bolivian uprising, is all down, down, down and seems to go on forever with indistinguishable skirmishes. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/che-film-review-126170/) - **The New Yorker**, Anthony Lane: Soderbergh's two-part film is a scrupulous but emotionally flat procedural on guerrilla warfare that avoids hagiography and shows the shift from dream to disillusion. It is marked by precise detail yet lacks dramatic impact or deep insight into its subject's passions. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/19/ches-way) - **The New York Times**, A.O. Scott: The film is an epic but ultimately evasive portrait that prioritizes formal sophistication and factual detail over moral reckoning with its subject. It excels as a master class in filmmaking technique while falling short as history. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/movies/12che.html) - **The Times**, Edward Porter: The film reconstructs Che's failed Bolivian campaign with impressive persuasiveness and observes him nobly leading his men, but it lacks tension or clear sense of what Soderbergh aimed to achieve. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/che-part-two-2v0fqq25rbn) - **Variety**, Todd McCarthy: Soderbergh's ambitious four-hour presentation of Che's life is defiantly nondramatic, with part two feeling like a military training documentary that lacks excitement. Neither half stands alone satisfyingly, and the whole offers more aggravations than rewards. [Read](https://variety.com/2008/film/awards/che-2-1117937244/) - **Eye for Film**, Chris (70/100, inferred): The critic views it as a commendable achievement in documenting history with integrity, though it lacks dramatic tension and may disappoint those seeking entertainment. They single out the authentic mise-en-scene and Benicio Del Toro's portrayal of a tragic hero for praise. [Read](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/che-guerilla-film-review-by-chris) - **Paste**, Jesse Jarnow (65/100, inferred): Soderbergh and Del Toro treat Che’s life as a realist epic in this audacious four-hour-plus film focused on guerrilla struggles. The marches across Cuba and through Bolivia’s jungles are deeply tedious, but Guevara’s unbendable will centers the two missions—one ascendant, one disastrous—and Soderbergh is ultimately victorious. [Read](https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/che-the-argentine-guerrilla) - **Digital Spy**, Simon Reynolds (60/100, inferred): The critic finds Che Part 2 an uncompromised but dragging work that excels in authenticity and Del Toro's performance depicting Guevara's downfall, though it lacks human depth and moves too slowly. [Read](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a146429/che-part-2/) - **The Skinny**, Keir Roper-Caldbeck (****): Praises Part 2 for its intimacy and tragic portrayal of Che's doomed Bolivian revolution, contrasting it with the more ponderous Part 1. [Read](https://www.theskinny.co.uk/film/new-releases/che-parts-one-and-two) ## Details - **Director:** Steven Soderbergh - **Director:** Steven Soderbergh - **Screenplay:** Terrence Malick, Benjamin A. Van Der Veen, Peter Buchman - **Cinematography:** Steven Soderbergh - **Editor:** Pablo Zumárraga - **Music:** Alberto Iglesias - **Production design:** Antxón Gómez - **Costume design:** Bina Daigeler - **Producer:** Laura Bickford, Benicio del Toro - **Cast:** Benicio del Toro as Ernesto Che Guevara; Carlos Bardem as Moisés Guevara; Demián Bichir as Fidel Castro; Joaquim de Almeida as President René Barrientos; Pablo Durán as Pacho (Alberto Fernández Montes de Oca); Eduard Fernández as Ciro Algarañaz; Marc-André Grondin as Régis Debray; Óscar Jaenada as Darío (David Ardiazola) - **Runtime:** 2h 15m - **Release (Spain):** 27 February 2009 - **Genres:** Drama, History, War - **Budget:** $58 million - **Box office:** $9 million ## Where to watch in Spain - Amazon Prime Video: streaming - Amazon Prime Video: rent €2.99, sd - Amazon Prime Video: buy €7.99, sd *Checked 2026-09-10.* Also available in: AT, AU, BE, BG, BR, CL, CO, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, GB, IE, IT, MX, NO, NZ, PL, RO, RS, SE, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *The Battle of Algiers* (1966), Fi1m 93: Pontecorvo’s insurgency film, shot like news footage, with the same refusal to cheer. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-battle-of-algiers.md) - *Army of Shadows* (1969): Melville’s Resistance drama: cold rooms, waiting, and people who know they will lose. - *The Motorcycle Diaries* (2004), Fi1m 77: The young Guevara on the road, for anyone who wants the man before the beret. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-motorcycle-diaries.md) - *Memories of Underdevelopment* (1968), Fi1m 84: Havana after the revolution, seen by a man who stayed and cannot decide why. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/memories-of-underdevelopment.md) - *Bloody Sunday* (2002), Fi1m 83: Greengrass’s Derry, hand-held and hour by hour, with the same faith in the record. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/bloody-sunday.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/che-part-two