Paul Krik’s low-budget indie thriller Able Danger is nicely shot in tinted b&w hi-def video, slickly mixed, scored and edited almost to the point of being indistinguishable from this or that Bruckheimer TV show. And Krik is a keen film student: Many of the film’s images recall Welles, Lang, Fuller, Mann, Kubrick, Frankenheimer– you name it. Hipster-geek lead Adam Nee, as a conspiracy theory blogger convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, shows subtle, offbeat charm. Young film majors curious about how to pull off a polished look on a shoestring may want to check it out. Krik gets a lot of mileage out of color correction software, real Brooklyn locations and one beat-up mountain bike.
Most memorably Krik also shows an eye for cute European and American hipster chicks in dark femme fatale dresses, retro skirts and, most memorably, panties. Along with the general flippant air and egghead referentiality, the way Krik’s camera leers at gorgeous white women should earn him faint comparison to Jean-Luc Godard. Elina Löwensohn, as the lead femme, might have stepped out of Alphaville.
But the conspiracy crowd Able Danger hopes to entertain and poke affectionate fun at will likely find it a trifling way to re-package the crime of the century. Well, at least I did. The facts and suppositions surrounding 9/11 were more entertainingly dramatized in docs like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Zeitgeist: The Movie. Those films also manage to arouse something along with the mischief that Able Danger never gets around to: a chill down the spine arising from real fear and sorrow.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth