Finally got around to seeing this beast of a flick and, let me tell you, it floored me.
Daniel Radcliffe (who, if you're not following his career, is doing truly great work) plays Nate Foster, an FBI agent hunting terrorists. He's recruited by Agent Zamparo (Toni Collette in a thankless but vital performance), who suspects a white supremacist cell of plotting an act of domestic terrorism. Nate is chosen to infiltrate the neo-Nazis and uncover the plot.
That's about it for plot, without giving anything away. Most pleasure from viewing the film comes from the character-driven drama as the eminently likable Radcliffe becomes a muscly skinhead and ascends the ranks of a cabal of evil organizations. Its likeable cast (including Nestor Carbonell, Tracy Letts, and Sam Trammell) help make the film as rich as it is painful to watch. Of course, morbid pleasure also comes from the research the filmmakers have done into these groups of white supremacists. The costumes are disturbingly on-point. The array of white men feel disturbingly accurate, from punks and thugs who just want to break things and cut people to hardcore anarchist survivalists, from comfortable middle-class culture snobs to full-blown terrorists willing to give up their lives to cause chaos.
I found the screenplay to be especially fascinating. Though the plotting occasionally lacks cohesion, often skipping what I would consider crucial scenes, the dialogue is dense and loaded with layers of meaning. The Nazis speak in aphorisms, euphemisms, and coded language that is at once terrifyingly specific and laughably self-aggrandizing. They think they are far more important and intelligent than they are, which is deeply funny and therefore unnerving. They talk in broad, sweeping terms as if they, often individually, have greater insight into the functions of the world around them (rather, as they see it, against them). More fascinating still is the extent to which the different factions of the movement see each other as irritating, ineffectual, and even threatening.
The film suffers, it's true, when it tries to become a straight-up thriller, focusing its third act on the terrorist plot perpetrated by the Nazis. But the first two acts are endlessly engaging. Though not as passionate or horrifying as American History X or The Believer, this movie nevertheless works best when Radcliffe is on screen, desperately working to convince the Nazis he's one of them. Can he try to prevent a black man from attack without being found out? Can his heart break for brainwashed children without showing it? And, finally, will he give up his life for the terrorist plot if it means cracking open the inner workings of the cell?
I will say, knowing this movie came out two years ago sent chills down my spine more than once. In one scene, Radcliffe joins in a Nazi march that is attacked by anti-fascists. Having seen these kinds of things happen lately in the news may have desensitized me, as I didn't react overmuch to this scene. But surely this movie was sickeningly prescient.
Oh, and one last thought. Just a reminder: Guys. Nazis are BAD. There is NOTHING good about Nazis.
I'd be so down for big studios to make more movies like this that remind us that there aren't "good people on both sides" of our ongoing war against Nazis.
IMDb: Imperium
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