77 Minutes

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

This could've been an excellent doco. It's an absolutely horrific tragedy and a piece of history that deserves to be told but it needs to be done with some class and sophistication. The director (who put himself in this more than he should have) who also interviews the victims and officers on the scene and is so incredibly ridiculous in his line of questioning.

There also should've been a content warning about the police crime scene video.

Heartbreaking story and I can safely say no horror movie in my experience comes close to the real life horror of this story. That being said, I'll agree with 95% of the other reviewers who fairly criticize the slanted view the director of this film takes towards law enforcement. Hope you learn something from the well deserved slamming you're taking here, but I doubt it.

77 Minutes (2016)

*** (out of 4)

This documentary takes a look at the 1984 San Ysidro massacre where a gunman entered a McDonalds and eventually killed twenty-one people in seventy-seven minutes before he was shot by a sniper.

77 MINUTES is a documentary that I have mixed feelings on. As with most documentaries, the filmmaker certainly has an opinion on the subject and director Charlie Minn has no problem putting himself on screen. We hear him asking questions. We often see him asking the questions. The film even ends with him questioning what happened that day.

I'll get the good stuff out of the way first. The film does a very good job at taking a look at a tragic event and I thought it was great that it focused on the victims. We get to hear some heroic stories from that day and we also get to see the damage that the survivors had. The documentary pays a nice tribute to those people and it makes the right decision not to say the killer's name. These stories are heartbreaking and rather depressing to listen to but they are well told.

The controversy comes from two things. One, the director decided to show the actual police video, which includes a look at all of the dead bodies including an eight-month-old baby. These images are hard to look at and I'm sure most people would rather hit the FF button rather than look at them and that's understandable. I don't think the director was doing it to exploit the victims but to show how bad the carnage was.

The biggest issue I had with the film is the fact that the director decides to play a "Monday morning quarterback" and goes after the police. He constantly attacks the police and their decisions on that day and he even goes as far to attack a few of the people he is interviewing. To me this was just downright stupid and some of the questions were poorly done. I mean, what would you tell the victims today? Really? Clearly the director wanted the police to know they were the cause for this and this whole mentality was rather stupid to me.

Even more stupid was the final message right before the credits where the director attacks the police even more. It really seemed like the director was looking at this 1984 event as something that happened today. Things were a lot different back then and not everything was handled the same way. Mass shootings weren't common in 1984 so obviously they were handled differently. I understand not naming the killer but to attack the police more than the psycho who went in there and did the killing was just stupid.

If you didn't know who Charlie Minn was before this documentary, trust me he'll make sure you won't forget. The guy inserts himself in almost every interview and it comes off as a desperate egocentric way of saying "Remember I'm the director! Don't forget who I am!" You'll hear testimony from victims & responders & then out of nowhere for no reason at all, Charlie Minn will insert himself into the film just to make sure you remember who he is.

If you aren't familiar with the tragedy that occurred in 1984 then you might find the 1st half engaging, to his credit, Charlie Minn does do fairly well showing the perspectives of victims & 1st responders and balancing it out with pictures & news report stock footage. Where the film falls flat is with Charlie Minn's journalistic approach, Charlie Minn doesn't come off as a level headed documentarian but a biased news reporter.

One of the biggest issues I have with this film is that it has an over reliance of stock footage from the crime scene and it's not just shown for a few seconds it's shown throughout the film and it's beyond disturbing to watch. You see the bodies of men, women & children & even a baby. It's clear Charlie Minn is trying to use shock value to get the audience more engaged into the tragedy but it's completely unnecessary, we know this is a horrible event and we don't need to be shown the corpses of the poor victims every 30 seconds.

Another issue I have is Charlie Minn's approach to directing, as a filmmaker myself I know that documentaries shouldn't be biased and try to keep everything neutral that way the audience comes to their own conclusions. Charlie Minn tells the audience how they should feel, he wants you to be mad at the police and blame them for so many lives lost.

It's clear from his questions & answers what his goal is. He's trying to point a finger to blame and he focuses a lot of his blame on the police for taking so long to take the shooter down. I understand he thinks the police should have acted much faster but it's clear from his answers to first responders at the time that he's very naive and ignorant to the protocol and orders of law enforcement. Mr Minn needs to keep in mind that this took place in 1984, a time when mass shootings were not very common, he also has to take into account how the shooting effected the community and how it is today, has there been any other mass shootings in this city? Is crime in this city an issue? Do citizens feel unsafe still? Are citizens content with the way police do their job today? These are questions left unanswered that I wish the documentary went more into depth with. One of the first responders says he had a chance to take out the shooter at one point but didn't because he didn't know the circumstances of the situation, he didn't know whether or not the shooter had an accomplice and the shot he would have taken would have gone through a glass door which means there was a high chance it would have ricocheted off and missed. Personally I think the officer's reasons are valid and completely understandable, but Mr Minn makes it clear he thinks he should have taken the shot when he says "A bullet's a bullet". That response alone tells you everything you need to know about Charlie Minn's naiveness.

In conclusion I would have to say this tragedy deserves better, the film is mostly just a recap of events. Aside from the victims & first responders perspectives, there's really not much else the film adds, it doesn't even have much follow up with the victims, it's just having them relive that horrible day & a couple of sentences of what they're doing today. Charlie Minn may have had good intentions but his "style" and ego get in the way of maintaining a balanced and neutral documentary. Whether you agree with his views or not, it still comes off as unprofessional and biased. That's not what documentary filmmaking is.