If you want to see a film about a conflicted FBI agent infiltrating a modern day white supremacist revolutionary group, seek out the far superior 1988 Costa-Gavras film "Betrayed"
The script follows a basic Screen writing 101 format. Toni Collette, as a cliché seasoned FBI agent bucks the system and all her superiors who stubbornly dismiss her ideas, and she recruits an inexperienced young agent, played by Daniel Radcliffe, to infiltrate local white supremacists on the hunch that, just maybe, they are responsible for missing weapons grade radioactive material.
Fine... I'll swallow this premise if they can make it somehow realistic and interesting. Nope. The film makers not only showed almost no understanding of how the FBI operates, what these organized white supremacists actually do, but also little regard for common sense.
This inexperienced FBI agent manages, not only to infiltrate a group of thuggish skinheads, but also to rapidly rise up and infiltrate an organized separatist militia, but an inner circle of careful planning terrorists... all very quickly and easily, simply because the film makers were too lazy to write realistically and just wanted to move things along.
Radcliffe's undercover FBI agent character, for some insane reasoning of the writer, uses his real name and identity to infiltrate, and does not use any documentation to support his phony backstory of military experience. It also seems as if the only direction he was given was to constantly fidget and look nervous and scared at all times... as though this constant erratic guilty behavior wouldn't worry even the dumbest of people he was trying to fool.
It is lazy storytelling wherein events unfold and problems are resolved with great ease, because showing the difficulty of infiltrating and investigating would require the film makers to actually think through their story.
Yes, the subject matter is important and the threat of homegrown separatist groups is a serious threat... far more serious than this movie even seems to understand.
Important subject matter is no reason to overlook bad film making.
The script follows a basic Screen writing 101 format. Toni Collette, as a cliché seasoned FBI agent bucks the system and all her superiors who stubbornly dismiss her ideas, and she recruits an inexperienced young agent, played by Daniel Radcliffe, to infiltrate local white supremacists on the hunch that, just maybe, they are responsible for missing weapons grade radioactive material.
Fine... I'll swallow this premise if they can make it somehow realistic and interesting. Nope. The film makers not only showed almost no understanding of how the FBI operates, what these organized white supremacists actually do, but also little regard for common sense.
This inexperienced FBI agent manages, not only to infiltrate a group of thuggish skinheads, but also to rapidly rise up and infiltrate an organized separatist militia, but an inner circle of careful planning terrorists... all very quickly and easily, simply because the film makers were too lazy to write realistically and just wanted to move things along.
Radcliffe's undercover FBI agent character, for some insane reasoning of the writer, uses his real name and identity to infiltrate, and does not use any documentation to support his phony backstory of military experience. It also seems as if the only direction he was given was to constantly fidget and look nervous and scared at all times... as though this constant erratic guilty behavior wouldn't worry even the dumbest of people he was trying to fool.
It is lazy storytelling wherein events unfold and problems are resolved with great ease, because showing the difficulty of infiltrating and investigating would require the film makers to actually think through their story.
Yes, the subject matter is important and the threat of homegrown separatist groups is a serious threat... far more serious than this movie even seems to understand.
Important subject matter is no reason to overlook bad film making.