Dave Herman’s directorial debut, “Able Danger,” a neo-noir surrounding a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and the dragnet he finds himself in after running into a mysterious woman, is a rookie effort to the core while lacking the essential elements that make successful neo-noirs work.
Thomas Flynn, played by Adam Nee, is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who spends his days as the owner of a liberal coffee shop in Brooklyn (based off the real-life Vox Pop in Brooklyn) and nights as a maverick blogger/barely-published author. His calm life is suddenly in jeopardy when an over-the-top Eastern European femme fatale (played by alluring Hal Hartley troupe-member Elina Lowensohn), shows up at his shop proclaiming to hold the secret hard-dive that would prove the United States government as the architects behind 9/11. This proves to be the catalyst that sparks a series of events which drag Flynn further and further into a labyrinth of lies and deceit.
The problems for this project begin with the fact that it is a cheap rip-off the John Huston classic noir “The Maltese Falcon” and plays as though it is a parody of itself. The increasingly absurd score does nothing to help this misconception. The villains come off as wholesale versions of corrupt cops and evil Germans pulled straight from a 1950’s WB B-movie. But believe it or not, the completely ridiculous fake accents and comical score aren’t the biggest flaw of the film; that honor would have to go to the overly twisted plot structure. In its attempt to follow the template of a classic Dashiell Hammett private eye novella, the creators incorporated an overly complex plot. The twist come one after another, and while you attempt to grasp the significance of the one that just occurred, another twist is coming right up, and they seem to uncover mysteries that don’t make any sense but just exist to set up the next set of shocking discoveries. When one compares ‘Danger’ to another recent, low-budget neo-noir such as Rian Johnson’s splendid debut, “Brick,” the flaws become even more apparent.
Even though it was riddled with an awful score, ridiculous plot and worse accents, the movie was not without its bright spots. Herman’s choices in photographing the movie, such as contrasting a black and white with color TV sets and computer monitors, are slightly interesting, and such choices serve as momentary distractions from the movie’s overall blaring flaws. Able Danger is premiering in New York City on September 11th, in Two Boots Theater and other select theaters in Washington D.C., Oakland and Montreal.
Luckily, not all movie gowers have such a hard time following a following a story line that isn’t hand fed to them. I’ll give Spencer the benefit of the doubt that he probably had to cook dinner while watching the film and thus had a hard time keeping up — such is the plight of overworked Bloggers reviewing films on a deadline from a DVD — I get it Spencer — no time to actually check up on the backstory of the Able Danger, or that Huston’s was actually the third film version of Hammet’s Maltese Falcon — a book, along with all of Hammet’s work, I actually read. The comparison with Brick is a bit apples and oranges, because while I think Brick is a great movie, and I don’t want to take anything away from it, it’s a pure detective story with no cultural-political relevance. No ideas beyond the plight of a HS nerd.
Others, seem to get that there’s more at stake in Able Danger, for example.
FILM JOURNAL REVIEW OF
ABLE DANGER
Rated:NR
Like a tsunami or an earthquake, the well-documented corruption, cronyism and deception of the Bush administration has been so overwhelming and catastrophic that as a nation we’re pretty much too stunned-simple to even process it anymore. What other explanation for the World Trade Center attack having come under a Republican president who’d politicized the FBI and other agencies, packing them with inept loyalists, who yet somehow convinced us that Republicans are the better of the two parties at preventing terrorism? Hello?
In the face of such up-is-down, black-is-white manipulation—and that was just one small example, Brownie—one refuge is absurdity. Writer-director Dave Herman, a.k.a. Paul Krik, understands this. Make a serious drama suggesting the Bush administration had complicity in 9/11, and you risk jeers as if suggesting the Earth is flat. Make a mildly surreal, mostly black-and-white homage to film noir, set in the built-in ironic enclave of hipster Brooklyn, and you can say all sorts of things, some of them maybe even true.
Opening with ominous imagery and lettering inspired by Soviet-era propaganda posters, and moving to grainy surveillance-video footage with Terminator-like screen text ID’ing individuals and listing courses of action, Able Danger establishes a mood that’s both wearily resigned to the privacy-eroding parade of security cameras that now capture our every public step and over-the-top enough to lull you into the comfort zone of satire. But the titular Able Danger was a very real, classified intelligence project begun by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in late 1999 to develop a plan to combat international terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in particular. Its existence became public in 2005, after the project was terminated, and while it’s unclear whether it did identify one of the 9/11 masterminds, Mohamed Atta, as its proponents claim, it seems all too clear that its findings were suppressed and its personnel stonewalled, adding one more layer of mystery to the WTC attack.
The what-if scenario here involves modern-day versions of film noir archetypes (with old-fashioned rat-a-tag dialog), as opposed to being neo-noir, which lays modern-day mannerisms onto the genre’s classic themes. As always, you’ve got the well-meaning schlub—in this case, lefty coffeehouse/performance-space owner Thomas Flynn (Adam Nee)—who gets suckered by some mysterious damsel-in-distress—in this case, the pseudonymous Birgit Weber (Elina Löwensohn). As for the stuff dreams are made of, here it’s a hard drive containing some MacGuffin or other. Flynn publishes a 9/11 conspiracy-theory website, and when his friend and partner Nathan (Brandon Bales) is killed while escorting the dame to a meeting with some shady European with ties to Atta, well, when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.
That something leads poor sap Thomas into the bowels of danger he’s not able to readily avoid. Another friend is killed; Thomas gets tazed, man; Birgit Weber is really Kasia Fuchs; and darned if the effete operative Axel (Michael J. Burg) isn’t Joel Cairo gone German. Nee gives a well-constrained performance as a fanatical idealist with tough-nerd swagger, who really is in over his head, and the Bucharest-born Löwensohn, as always, rivets you to her every scene and slinky move. Her Birgit/Kasia is a not-quite-undead emotional vampire, whose wide, world-weary eyes are her fangs. And in Herman/Krik’s vision of Brooklyn, these two souls exist in a borough so sad and strange that Jesus watches through many icons but doesn’t lift a finger to help.
That’s probably just cosmic indifference, or maybe everything here is so odd and disturbing, He simply wants to see what happens next. Despite some low-budget shortcomings—the audio can be muddy, the music occasionally bombastic, and some shots here and there might have benefited from a few more takes—Able Danger is a smart and all-too-conceivable conspiracy thriller that raises serious questions in less-than-serious ways. Do we really think we know the entire truth behind 9/11? If so, the movie shows a bridge it might want to sell you….
Critic: Frank Lovece
http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/reviews/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003849095
thanks for posting
Paul Krik
writer/director
http://www.AbleDangerTheMovie.com