Wasp Network Parent Guide

Life in Cuba is difficult – food rationing, power blackouts, and fuel shortages make life even harder for pilot Rene Gonzalez (Edgar Ramirez). Seeking a better life, Rene abandons his wife Olga (Penelope Cruz) and family to flee to Miami. But he isn’t the only man escaping Cuba in the early 1990s – Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura) and Gerardo Hernandez (Gael Garcia Bernal) have also made it into Florida. There, they find a number of Cuban exiles working, ostensibly, to bring freedom to Cuba and help immigrants and refugees make a new life in America… but that may not be all they’re doing.

As I’ve said before, historical films are a tricky business, and filmmakers have a tendency to pump them full of action, sex, and yet more action to keep audiences interested. Wasp Network doesn’t follow that pattern – which I appreciate – but it also doesn’t spend very much time exploring the characters. The result is a movie that feels like two hours of a history textbook unfolding on screen. Although, in fairness to the history textbook, the plot meanders around a good deal more than anything you’re likely to have read in social studies.

There’s a really interesting story to be told in here, but it gets buried in a poorly written script. The first hour of the film is basically a cold open, where characters are incompletely introduced into situations without context, making it difficult for viewers to get engaged in the story. The second hour has a narrator explaining things, which is an improvement, but it feels extremely odd to get a narrator halfway in. Then there’s the strange scene transitions, awkward editing, and one completely superfluous sex scene.

Which leads me to the content – aside from the sex, the rest of the content is surprisingly mild. Like I said, this film dodges the classic trap of injecting unnecessary action into the film, which means that the violence (mostly in the form of explosions and bombings) is almost completely impersonal and highly sanitized. You see a blast in an area you know is populated, but there are no severed limbs shooting past the camera. This film is pulled into the TV-MA rating bracket, as near as I can tell, solely for one scene which contains almost all of the film’s profanity, and the aforementioned brief sex scene which features a topless woman. Without these issues, Wasp Network would easily score a PG-13 rating.

If the writing were clearer, or the editing a touch more brisk, I would be willing to cautiously recommend this to older audiences as a historical resource. But, frankly, if you can read the Wikipedia page on the Cuban Five in under two hours, that’s a better use of your time. There are worse ways to spend two hours, but there are also much better ones.