77 Minutes

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.

Clearly, the documentarian is biased, attempting to incite anger and blame against the police department for their delay in responding to the scene. Poor fact checking as he questions former SWAT commander, Jerry Sanders, for faulty beeper (from 1984!), being at a gathering where "alcohol was being consumed" (false), and not giving sniper "green light". Documentarian degrades the memories of those lost and traumatized by focusing his film on blame while he himself has no tactical training. Such a shame.

Learning from mistakes made in approaching a mass-shooting scene, trying to apprehend the perpetrator(s) is how imrovements are made, how new generations of law rnforcement are trained. In 1984, mass shootings were relatively non-existent. The interviewer seems determined to ignore the conditions and point out hypothetical 'what if' scenarios - who can know those answers, those outcomes?

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

I was 8 when this happened so I hadn't heard anything about it until now. It's absolutely heartbreaking. Unimaginable suffering in this community.

The questions Charlie Minn asked the police officers were ridiculous. I don't know if Charlie Minn was alive in 1984 when this tragedy occurred but knowledge of mass shootings was minimal. Every police department did not employ officers who had experience responding to them. It's not like it is today. People weren't carrying cell phones. Information was not received in minutes. Of course things could've been done differently, lessons were learned, protocol was changed. But to personally attack individual officers is so naïve and hurtful. No officer arrived on scene and thought "we'll just sit bank and let this play out". He makes it sound like they chose to let people die. These officers did what they knew to do at the time.

The appetite for this genre seems indiscriminate to wasting time with meandering, inarticulate personal accounts. I can't think of an excuse for run time 1.5 hrs except laziness or greed. This should be a tight 30 mins.