The Honey Trap

As "The Honey Trap: A True Story of Love, Lies and the FBI" (2024 release; 82 min) opens, President Eisenhower talks about the "military industrial complex", which then leads to the "military entertainment complex", as in: how Hollywood and the military use each other in advancing their interests. We then get introduced to Denis Cuspert, a German rapper-turned-ISIS recruiters... At this point we are 10 minutes into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is the latest from producer-director Chris Moukarbel ("Wig"). Here he assesses how a German rapper becomes enarmoured with Islam, and eventually joins ISIS in the early 2010's. The FBI is paying close attention and puts translator Daniela Greene on the case. Things derail quickly from there. The problem with this documentary is that it it trying to tackle too many things without digging deeper. Is this an analysis of how ISIS is influenced by Hollywood when making ISIS propaganda videos? Is this an analysis of how the FBI tracks terrorism? Is this an analysis of how an FBI operative gets entangled with the very subject person the operative is following? The answer seems to be "all of the above", but in a way that no definitive answers are provided. At just 82 minutes, this documentary could've one a hole lot more, but for whatever reason, the production team choose not to go in-depth on any of these aspects, and that is a shame.

"The Honey Trap: A True Story of Love, Lies and the FBI" recently started streaming on Showtime (which is now part of Paramount+) and I watched it the other night, feeling a little bewildered and frustrated when the end credits started rolling. If you have any interest in how ISIS works and how the FBI is tracking this, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

This story should have been an interesting one, and there is certainly no shortage of angles from which it could have been explored. Unfortunately, this documentary bounces around with no clear motive, first talking about the relationship between Hollywood and global politics, touching briefly on racism toward Muslims in America, and blathering on about a little of this and a little of that without ever getting into the meat of anything.

This film is marketed as being about Daniela Greene and her relationship with Denis Cuspert, but offers absolutely no details about said relationship other than that they "used pet names" occasionally in their messages. Very little information is divulged about anything really, and the viewer is left with more questions than answers, albeit not the thought provoking kind. Inexplicably, there is a scene at the end with a former coworker of Daniela's which leads absolutely nowhere. The transitions between scenes are jarring and stylistically the film feels like an extremely long trailer for a better, more thought out documentary, as it contains just about every stereotypical documentary trope in the book with no substance to back it up.