Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsAn Ok documentary about a serious subject
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2017
Ok, so I felt that I needed to balance out the deluge of five star reviews on here with (what I felt was) the truth. It seemed a little wrong that this documentary pretty much had a 5 star average rating. When I walked away from it, I felt like it was more of a three star movie. This is really hard, because it is hard to separate the subject of a documentary from the actual documentary. The artistry of the piece and the subject are two different things. Of course, I mean no disrespect to Jim Foley or his family, but how was this subject matter handled?
For those that don't know, Jim Foley was an embedded reporter who reported on the Syrian civil war. He was exposing the atrocities of the Syrian civil war, and pretty much made everyone look bad. In such a decayed situation, he was seen as an actual enemy combatant. Of course, belligerents saw him as an enemy spreading propaganda. For this, he was captured and executed. He was actually killed in a very gruesome way: he was beheaded by a now infamous terrorist "Jihadi John."
The problem for me is that most documentaries don't jump off the screen at you. They all seem just so matter-of-fact and kind of mundane. There is very little way to bring poetry to every day events, and to do so would risk distorting the truth. To make things too slick and exciting would probably be to make them more slick and exciting than they were in real life. This documentary suffers from that matter-of-fact mundaneness, although it is commendable that they seemed to stick to the facts of the case. For that reason, this movie just feels like a transfer of information, as opposed to anything more illuminating than that.
There isn't a whole lot to say beyond that; I think that sums it up. One small thing is that you feel a twinge wanting to blame Jim Foley for getting himself into the mess that got him killed. He voluntarily went into a war zone, even after he had been assaulted and threatened with kidnapping in another incident before. That takes some of the moral sharpness out of the subject, and makes his cause a little bit harder to like. However, there is no doubt that he was brave and doing what he thought was right. In any event, I can't say that the editing, music, or any other element of this documentary went any further than most run-of-the-mill documentaries, and I feel like I have to give it a pretty average rating of three stars.
