Review by Daniel Lima The 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City remains the single deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history. In telling its story, it’s not hard to imagine a variety of approaches: a character study of the perpetrator, a slow-burn thriller, a procedural that details everything that went into its execution, even using this one case as an examination of the right-wing libertarian politics of the era. McVeigh studiously and stubbornly resists any of these. The result is a film that does not seem to have a single animating principle beyond having enough footage to make a feature-length movie. Timothy McVeigh, the man who planted the truck with the fertilizer bomb at the site, is played by Alfie Allen. He’s a disaffected Gulf War veteran, slowly radicalized by instances of government overreach that animated many in the 1990s (most notably, the sieges at Waco and Ruby Ridge). He lives a quiet existence, but underneath his stoic exterior lies a man burning with passions that have long since congealed into something more hateful. At least, that’s probably the intent. Sadly, most of the insight into McVeigh as a person has to come from outside knowledge of the case because, as portrayed, he, the man, was a near-mute with no discernible personality traits beyond blankly looking into space. Perhaps Allen was the wrong choice for such a subdued role, but as written, there’s simply not much indication of how McVeigh views the world, how he connects with other people, or why the people in his orbit even stand to be in his company in the first place. It’s rare to walk into a biopic and walk out knowing less about the subject than before, but such is the case here. The film structures itself by detailing the inception of the bombing plan up through the day it goes off. To give credit where it’s due, at first, the slow, deliberate pace seems to evoke something like an S. Craig Zahler movie, giving a pronounced weight to something as simple as meeting a strange man at a gun show or being stopped by a police officer for speeding (well, simple for a white man). Unfortunately, setting itself before the bombing does mean there is no tension in any of the situations McVeigh finds himself in. As scenes where there is no danger and no information about the man is being revealed drag on and on, things quickly tip into tedium. As a sort of fictional document on the process behind planning out such a deadly attack, the movie immediately compromises itself by inventing things whole cloth. A local waitress who takes an interest in McVeigh, an old man in federal custody facing execution for a hate crime who McVeigh visits in prison, a bewildering French-Canadian man looking to recruit McVeigh into a wider movement. One scene shows the man seemingly motivated to murder a Black man simply because he put on rap music in a jukebox bar; multiple scenes seem to go so far as to imply that there was a second bomber with him when he planted the bomb at the federal building.
Fidelity to real life is hardly a prerequisite in making a film like this, though it could be argued there’s a degree of responsibility being flouted in fabricating so much. More aggravating is that all these inventions amount to absolutely nothing. None of the interactions with these characters reveal anything more about McVeigh’s psyche that isn’t already evident: he’s cold, unsociable, and identifies with right-wing grievances of the time. The only thing all these people add is minutes to the run time. What’s most aggravating about the movie’s failure to do anything with this story is how fascinating it actually is. The Oklahoma City bombing was the culmination of years of right-wing extremist agitation about the government’s abuse of police power, a mind-boggling thing to imagine thirty years on with a conservative embrace of state-sanctioned violence. McVeigh himself was a true, passionate devotee, going so far as to end friendships over what he saw as great evils the government perpetrated within its borders and abroad. At least some of his agitations could even be said to be reasonable, even if his actions were not. This level of moral complexity, this snapshot of the time this story provides, the anger and animus of man at its center, is completely absent from this dull, soulless retelling. McVeigh ends with a flurry of news clips from the immediate aftermath of the attack. One, in particular, stands out: at what appears to be a demonstration of what a fertilizer bomb is capable of, a young woman smiles and laughs at the sheer power of the device, then slowly breaks down into heavy sobs as she realizes the horror of what it wrought. When the most emotionally stirring part of your movie is news footage from three decades ago, something has gone horribly wrong. McVeigh is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City. Rating: 1/5
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