The McDonald's Massacre. Thirty-four years ago, it was the worst shooting in American history and forced the producers of "Red Dawn" to remove a shot of a tank rolling up to a McDonald's from the movie. That little piece of trivia is the reason I was aware of this tragedy in the first place, and it's for that reason that I was psyched for a documentary. Hopefully, a good one.
But "77 Minutes" does not measure up. The movie was produced with an axe to grind, and filmmaker Charlie Minn leaves no illusions about it. His beef is with the police who failed to take immediate action, and almost every officer interviewed is taken to task. You can understand a person in Minn's position who wants answers for those wronged, but this isn't a quest; he's already made up his mind and now the police have to explain why they screwed up. That's not journalism, and it becomes grating after a while.
What Minn does get right however is a refusal to celebrate the killer (I don't think the man's name is even uttered in the film), and instead letting the survivors speak. That's the reason to see this movie. I even appreciate the use of graphic crime scene footage to impress upon our current desensitized state the horrors witnessed that day. Yes, even the gratuitous dead infant shots. It all works to convey the victims' traumas.
I found myself on the side of the police in this movie. Not all of them became politicians, and you can tell that they're sincere in their appraisals of the operation carried out that day; they've clearly wrestled with this for years. And I liked hearing from them. But it's as if Minn lets off the killer as an anomalous crazy and instead demands to know why the police were the bad guys in taking so long to take him down.
And that is abhorrent.
4/10
