BEFORE: OK, I'm all caught up and trying to get back in the swing of things now - I'm due to hit Father's Day right on the button, so at this point, don't tell me there's another film with Benedict Cumberbatch in it, because I just can't work it in, I just don't have the time. But now I also have three more shifts at the Tribeca Festival, and they've tended to run late, so for the next few nights, I may not get home until midnight or later. I'll try to maintain my viewing schedule, but my posting schedule may lag a little bit.
Benedict Cumberbatch carries over from "Stuart: A Life Backwards".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Report" (Movie #3,523)
THE PLOT: Mohamedou Ould Slahi fights for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. government for years.
AFTER: This is based on a true story, remember those years after 9/11 where the U.S. just locked up people in Guantanamo Bay, without cause, just because they had reason to believe that removing these 800 people from society would make our country safer? And there was this thing called the Patriot Act that somehow made this OK? Yeah, it's hard to believe that we'd ever come to think of that time as "the good old days", but that's where we find ourselves.
The reality is that this individual was horribly inconvenienced, incarcerated for 7 years without being charged with any crime, just being questioned, every day, for all that time. And then when he finally was granted access to a lawyer - which felt a bit perfunctory, like they only gave him a lawyer because the U.S. government was maybe getting ready to prosecute him for something - the lawyer filed for habeus corpus, which is a request to produce the evidence being used against him, or at least the evidence of there being evidence, of which there was none. He won his case, which meant that technically he should have been released, but at this point the new Obama administration wanted to hold him further, appealed his release, and that turned into ANOTHER 7 years before he was freed. Yep, fourteen years at Guantanamo without being charged with a crime, so that happened - and again, this is just ONE man out of nearly 800 people who were held there.
Even if you don't get into the waterboarding and psychological torture, that's a huge chunk of this man's life wasted, for no reason, except to make Americans feel a little more comfortable that he and people like him have been removed from society. But if it can happen to this guy, then it could happen to ANY of us, or at least those of us who are of Middle Eastern descent. Sure, there's a precedent, the U.S. government interred a lot of Japanese-Americans, put them in camps, away from the rest of society, just so the U.S. citizens could sleep a little more soundly at night. But I think we all agree this too was overkill, way over the line of common human decency, and not the way that any government should treat its own people, regardless of their race.
As a movie, though, there are big problems here, mostly because nothing happens for two hours, representing the many years of no progress being made toward charging Slahi or taking steps to release him. This is the opposite of an action movie, it's more like an "inaction movie", when you get right down to it. We don't even get the typical clash between two lawyers, like you'd see in any great "Law & Order" episode, and with the lawyers played by Jodie Foster (representing the prisoner) and Benedict Cumberbatch (representing the government), that's a real shame - I would have liked to see those two sparring in a courtroom, that could have been at least as exciting as Tom Cruise interrogating Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men". Alas, it was not meant to be, because Cumberbatch's character, Lt. Col. Couch, has a crisis of conscience and his questions about the legality of this all force him to withdraw from the case. Jodie Foster's character, attorney Nancy Hollander, follows through and defends her client, even though she suspects for a while that he MIGHT be guilty. But as we all know now, our government was torturing prisoners and coercing confessions from them, and that sort of thing really needs to be taken into account. With enough pressure applied, anyone would confess to terrorism or murder or even kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.
They tried desperately to save this one, by jumping around in time a bit, flashing back to the worst days of the torture, but the damage was already done by this point.
Also starring Tahar Rahim (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Jodie Foster (last seen in "Motherhood"), Shailene Woodley (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Clayton Boyd, Denis Menochet (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Pope Jerrod (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Daniel Janks, Corey Johnson (last seen in "Genius"), Adam Neill, Darron Meyer, Langley Kirkwood, Saamer Usmani, David Fynn, Zachary Levi (last seen in "Shazam!"), Justine Mitchell (last seen in "Tristram Shandy"), Ralph Lawson, Stevel Marc, Adam Rothenberg, Matthew Marsh (last seen in "Unlocked"), Melissa Haiden, Zak Rowlands, Meena Rayann, Kiroshan Naidoo, Walter Van Dyk, Leon Clingman (last seen in "The Girl"), Roxy Nel, Litha Bam, Robert Hobbs (last seen in "Serenity"), Nezar Alderazi, Andre Jacobs
RATING: 5 out of 10 boxes of MFRs
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