Historical accuracy: 8
Acting: 6
Dialogue: 7
Camera work: 7
Editing: 7
Budget: 7
Story: 6
Theme: 6
Pure entertainment factor: 7
Video quality: 5
Special effects: 7
Pacing: 7
Suspension of disbelief: 7
Non-cringe factor: 7
Lack of flashbacks: 10
My second In the Line of Duty movie. First one was great. This is a step down as expected, but I actually still enjoyed it so I will for sure watch them all. It is TV movie quality. You see this in the acting, the camera work, the editing. But it also creates a unique cozy feeling of the 90's. A bit more simplified movie making.
The tension remains high and they really double down on the evilness of the cult leader who had kids with underage girls and slept with the wives of his followers. Also here seen as forbidding anyone else to have sex altogether. Which of course makes you question how a man this mad and insane could be charismatic enough long enough to gain followers ready to off themselves for him. So maybe the movie goes a tad overboard with his depiction, but this is not a good guy. Imagine a person convincing his friends, both moms and dads, to let him impregnate their underage daughter. His depiction here going over the history and what he did is great.
We follow them as they collect weapons to prepare for the end. Fighting the evil outsiders somehow. FBI prepares to take the kids away and storm the complex and the Waco people return fire. I do think the Waco TV show is better. Higher budget, amazing acting, and some more developed tension. This movie basically shows us clips of what happened without explaining much. The movie for sure has 5 times as much info about the cult itself. Waco took the side of the cult leader. He was seen as unwilling to have sex, the underage stuff was ignored, basically nearly most negative stuff about the cult was hidden away and we saw FBI storm the compound as the evil guys just interested in media exposure. This movie on the other hand skips everything outside the compound to a degree where it feels simplified. And it ends with FBI storming the compound with bullets flying everywhere. That's like half the way into the full story. We still have the negotiation and fire. The fire is the big event here. We know the cult members set it, but the gas FBI shot into the building caused it to be a greater disaster killing most people inside. Even the kids that the cult on purpose locked inside a room they couldn't escape from. The ending really lets it down as it has none. The FBI storming the compound is also quite nonsense here and mostly fiction. But we kinda understand what happened in real life. Just overlook 90% of the bullets.
I recommend the TV show, but it's so extremely pro cult that it feels bad to recommend it alone. I could recommend this movie to people needing more info on the cult itself, but you can also watch a documentary for that. It's ... mediocre. You will not be bored and the one romance is great here, but with the low budget and too fast pace it feels like it doesn't quite tie it all together.
