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I usually find imdb a pretty solid filter for picking a film - if the rating is sub 7, don't bother. This is not such a film, and it's absolutely worth your time. As is clear from the text of some of the reviews, a lot of contemporary politics is getting pulled into some assessments. This is much better than the (at time of writing) 6.8 would suggest.

To be clear there is nothing groundbreaking here - though simply making a serious, grounded police procedural in 2025, with no CG or superheroes in sight, has a welcome novelty to it. Jude Law is excellent in the lead role though. The cinematography is consistently strong, which is necessary as the script is both sparse and rather formulaic. There are certainly flaws here, with the ending in particular fumbled, giving the sense that the director couldn't quite decide how to avoid giving the lead white supremacist the myth-building end he wished for.

Ultimately though this is well made thriller of a kind all too rare today, and one with a timely message about the violent outcomes of white supremacist rhetoric.

The moment in slasher films where you stop rooting for the soon-to-be victim is when they do something so transparently stupid that you lose the will to care about their fate. The only novelty in this film is that the bafflingly stupid decision to put oneself in harms way comes not from a panicked teen running from the knifeman, but instead from the supposed hotshot cop hunting the perp.

Alas what could be an interesting inversion of the old trope just feels like par for the course for Remi Malek's car crash character. Nothing this character does - from latching onto Denzel Washington's 'Deke' at the start like a lost puppy, to volunteering to dig his own grave at the end - is coherent with the character we're introduced to, supposedly the Dept's star detective.

Washington's character is slightly better, but only in being internally consistent. As a ground-down old timer, haunted by his past cases, he's still amounts to no more than a cliche you've already seen a thousand times before.

Put together this pair have zero chemistry, which should be no surprise because beyond the actors playing them there is nothing noteworthy to find in either of them.

Leto appears to try and inject some charisma into proceedings, but here too finds himself working with the thinnest of material - namely a suspected killer whose totality consists of a very silly walk and some poor personal grooming.

The story itself is slow moving without the rewards of any depth, nor satisfying pay offs. At one point we're encouraged to consider the distraught family of one missing girl, and yet the movie's close gives no thought whatsoever to what it's chosen resolution means for them.

I gave it a 3 because it's shot competantly, and has great actors. Ultimately though this just makes it's grievous failings all the harder to stomach.

The great irony of this film is that the positive reviews (rightly) focus on the events which the film is ostensibly about, and yet the director of it seems bored by them. He decides the true story of a mid level bureaucrat who happened to save the world from annihilation wasnt enough to occupy two hours of film, so that becomes background material for a fly on the wall road trip. Ask yourself whether the recent Chernobyl TV drama would have been improved by cutting material on the details of what happened in the control room, so that it instead could show one of the engineers meeting American celebs twenty years later. Nope?

Even allowing for that decision, the documentary aspect is grievously undermined by elements which appear staged, most notably the opening in which there is magically a camera present the whole time that this guy is rejecting the media's attention. Elsewhere the editing of scenes is pure reality TV manipulation.

The message conveyed by all this is as confused as the structure is. Early on, before we've seen anything of what actually happened, we get a detour into 9/11 and fears of terrorists getting their hands on nukes. Surely the lesson of the 1983 event is that we can't allow the current obsessions with terrorism to distract from the dangers that our own governments pose with their nuclear arsenals? Why obscure that message? Why obscure it further with cameos from empty American celebrity - are we not distracted enough by these things already? Again it speaks of a director that has no respect for the significance of what he's dealing with.

This film isn't without it's successes, but it so fundamentally disrespects the gravity of events that it ultimately left me angry.