'McVeigh' Review: How Do You Take America's Worst Home-Grown Terrorist and Make a Movie Like This?
Mike Ott's McVeigh is a slow-burn take on the days leading up to a mass murder terrorist fails to live up to its subject matter.
Of all the questions that Mike Ott’s McVeigh leaves hanging, of all the threads of conspiracy and unspoken ties to the current political and administrative actions of the USA that are awkwardly hinted at yet never truly engaged with, there’s one query that, for a reviewer of film, is perhaps the most salient: Do we, in fact, need this film to exist? It’s not as if The Bin Laden Story, focusing on the Saudi's perspective, is soon to show up in multiplexes (though, quite honestly, that’d make for a far more fascinating portrait than those that take a different tack), so why do we need a film that humanizes, at times even sympathizes, with one of the most monstrous people in the history of America?
