Fundamentally people are suckers for the truth and the truth is on your side Bubba!

Rating: 8/10 (3 May 2012)

Director Oliver Stone gives the JFK assassination the royal treatment, over three hours worth of running time,in his blockbuster 1991 shocker of a movie "JFK" in it getting to the bottom to who in fact not only shot the president but who was both behind and planned the assassination and cover up that followed it. It was of all things the Clay Shaw, Tommy Lee Jones, trial that Stone used in his movie "JFK" to totally disprove the by now in the garbage can, in that almost no one believes it anymore, Warren Commission Report on the assassination. In that the Clay Shaw trial was the first and only trial that involved the JFK assassination with Shaw, a successful New Orleanes businessman,being charged with being, a planner not shooter, behind it.
The movie succeeds in disproving the Warren Commission but falls somewhat flat on its face in trying to connect a number of US Government agencies, like the CIA, the Mafia anti-Castro Cubans as well as Vice President Johnson as being somehow behind JFK's assassination. It was like Stone trowing a plate of spaghetti on the wall and see what would stick. Still Stone does a masterful job in waking the public up to the discrepancies as well as out right lies that they've been fed over the years by major members of the US media that Lee Harvey Oswald, Gary Oldman, was the lone nut assassin or the assassin at all. It's three years after JFK was killed that New Orleans D.A Jim Garrison, Kevin Costner, decided to reopen the case in that Oswald originally was in the city, as a Marxist Communist activist, the summer before JFK was murdered. Oswald was also closely associated with a number of people who wanted President Kennedy dead and made no bone in hiding their dislike of him.
As Garrison uncovers evidence that shows Oswlald was not what the media as well as the FBI and Warren Commission made him out to be key witnesses to what happened that fateful afternoon in Dallas Texas, November 22 1963, start to either clam up disappeared or meet an unexpected end in life. One of them is the wacko David Ferrie, Joe Pesci, who was in the same US civil air patrol unit with Oswald back in the mid 1950's when Oswald was still in his teens. Ferrie made an unexpected trip to Dallas to go duck hunting with a number of his friends the day that JFK was shot and left the very same evening! Was it to shoot JFK not ducks that Ferrie & Co were really interested in? It was through Ferrie as well as convicted male hooker Willie O'Keefe, Kevin Bacon, that eventually lead to Shaw in his being suspected of having foreknowledge to the JFK assassination. In that all three, Ferrie O'Keefe & Shaw, had a mutual acquaintance with non other then Lee Harvey Oswald! JFK's convicted in absentia assassin, since he was deceased and couldn't defend himself, by the Warren Commission!
As interesting as the movie is it's the last 15 or 20 minutes that really hit home and make an impression on the audience when D.A Jim Garrison makes his final summation to the jury. It's then that all the BS half truths lies shyster talk and inconsistencies in what happened on November 22, 1963 becomes apparent to those of us watching the film as well as those in the courtroom. Even though Garrison doesn't end up convicting Clay Shaw in his part in the JFK assassination he does in fact prove that we've, the American public, had been had or conned into believing what the US Government and Warren Commission told us the truth about the "facts" in the JFK assassination without as much as bothering to check any of the facts or evidence out! Which in fact D.A Jim Garrison not only did but in his Don Quixote like determination attempted to, against overwhelming odds,and proved to the jury! Who despite finding Shaw innocent agreed that a conspiracy was involved in the assassination of JFK.
P.S It was ironic as well as a stroke of genius for Stone to cast the real Jim Garrison in the film as non other as Chief Justice Earl Warren who comes across as if he's either brain dead or suffering from the advance stages of Alzhimer Disease in his robotic and zombie like performance. It was Warren and his Warren Commission that Jim Garrison was out to prove was either totally inept or criminally irresponsible in covering up the true facts behind the JFK assassination!