Very interesting film, but horrible pacing

Rating: 8/10 (13 June 2004)

This film has been met with a lot of controversy, when it first came out; a lot of people have a hard time accepting that this might be the truth. I don't know for sure how much of it is based on facts, but from what I understand, it's most of it, if not all of it. The film is packed with great actors, however many of them have very minor roles in the film. Regardless, every single performance is great, there wasn't any point where I thought that any of the actors did anything less than a great job portraying their respective characters. The film is well-edited, telling a lot of the story through flashbacks, and even giving us a visual of things that "supposedly" happened, but quite apparently never took place. All in all, this is a great film, but it could, and should, have been a perfect one. The problem with the film lies wholly in the pacing; in the first thirty minutes, it pretty much tells you the part of the story that everybody knows; the assassination itself, Lee Harvey Oswald's arrest and the killing of Oswald. After that, the plot starts to revolve around an investigation that simply takes far too long, and it only takes so long because it's filled with, well, filler. Had it been more to the point, instead of showing scene after scene of questioning, most of them nearly the same, it would have been much easier to follow the film's plot; I'm not saying that it's simple, in fact, it's anything but simple, but it was made out to be far more complicated than it had to be. I think there was about half an hour, maybe 45 minutes of the film where I didn't pay attention, simply because virtually nothing at all happened in the film. I don't have anything against three-hour films, I've seen several that I enjoyed regardless of length(Dances with wolves, Scarface(the Al Pacino version) etc.), but those did a good job of keeping me interested in the story, and the story constantly develops in them(especially Scarface), whereas in this one, it almost stands still, while we listen to one lying witness after the other, every single lie in details, instead of just a few lines to demonstrate that this character is lying. I just think there was far too much material, however true it may be, that belongs in a director's cut or a documentary than a regular feature film. It could easily have been cut down at least half an hour. For a political film, this is very good. In fact, for a film by any standard, it is very good. It's just too bad it isn't as great as it could have been, had it been paced better. Unless you have an enormous amount of interest in the subject matter, and an equal amount of patience, you probably won't be able to sit through this. I recommend it to pretty much anyone who's interested in knowing more about the Kennedy assassination, and who has the patience that is required. 8/10