No Stone Unturned movie review (2017)

June 2024 · 2 minute read

There was, and still is, speculation that the massacre represented a bloody statement against any possibility of reconciliation between factions. In the years that followed, as leads went nowhere and justice for the survivors never arrived, there was evidence suggesting a cover-up by police colluding with loyalists. The gunmen's car—which, to the delight of investigators had been left intact a few miles from the crime scene—was destroyed by police years later without warning or reason. Twelve years after the killing, the partners and children of victims held a press conference expressing their frustration and anger at the lack of justice.

Gibney took a cool, investigatory view of scandals and conspiracies in such films as "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," "Taxi to the Dark Side" and "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer." But he approaches this material in an uncharacteristically plugged in, heated way. He's taking it personally, and wants us to know he's taking it personally, no doubt because he grew close to individuals in the community near the crime scene while working on another project. We hear his off-screen voice asking questions and (unless my eye misleads me) see him pictured on camera. This is a righteous, at times angry movie. It wants to right a great wrong and bring peace to individuals who haven't been able to find any.

This is all sounds great in theory, but it turns to be dicey in practice. From the prologue, which recreates the massacre in the manner of a Hollywood action movie right down to the slow-motion, lavishly photographed closeups of guns firing and spent shell casings tumbling through the air, to the subsequent re-creations, to the pounding synth music and the other touches reminiscent of true-crime TV shows, "No Stone Unturned" at times veers close to a rant. It's clear that Gibney is going for something along the lines of Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line," which also used stylized re-creations, but the pieces don't fit together as neatly here, and there's a fair amount of "because I said so" argumentation in the sections that put together lingering details and attempt to suggest possible suspects.

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