"What has four eyes but still can't see?"

Rating: 6/10 (14 September 2009)

Sledgehammer-styled redemption over racial injustice and bigotry. Alan Parker directs this fictionalization of a true-life chapter in which determined F.B.I. men took on the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 after three Civil Rights workers disappeared while driving through a small redneck town in Mississippi. Parker puts the squeeze on us right from the start, omitting few horrors, eventually equating a quest for truth and justice to a violent surge of tables-turning vigilantism (as if there was no other way to succeed here). Since the lawmen in Jessup County have blood on their hands, and the black folks are too scared to speak for fear of retaliation by the whites, the F.B.I. choose to play hardball (impersonating hooded Klansman and taking on the sect's weakest members--even threatening to castrate the mayor!). This third-act revolution certainly gets the audience's blood pumping, while Trevor Jones' score sees to it that we're pounded over the head with suspenseful anticipation. But what happened to the Civil Rights Movement within the movie's time-frame? Surely it didn't disintegrate while this investigation went on? Parker scuttles it for the sake of good old melodrama. In the end, his film is just a well-made racial potboiler, though Gene Hackman's work as underling to Special Agent Willem Dafoe is top-notch (it is perhaps one of Hackman's best performances). Supporting cast also strong, and technically the picture is a superior piece of goods, but it won't be anyone's favorite movie. The spectrum here is narrow, and the statistics at the finale, rushed along, have no dramatic impact whatsoever. **1/2 from ****