“We have to do something,” says one of the many shadowy extremists who populate the fringes of Mike Ott’s tense drama McVeigh, a condensed account of the events that led Timothy McVeigh, an Iraq war veteran, to blow up the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma on 19 April 1995, killing 168 people and injuring 680 more. His close ties to white supremacist Richard Snell, a convicted murderer put to death by lethal injection that same day, might — reasonably — lead one, and especially people of color, to wonder why this man needs the oxygen of publicity, nearly 23 years after his own execution.
But Mike Ott’s film is a rare study of the radicalization of white working-class Americans, a phenomenon that went overground in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.
Ott carefully keeps us at arm’s length from his subject at all times, and his direction makes that clear from the outset. When we’re not following McVeigh, played with impressive, surly opacity by Britain’s Alfie Allen, we’re observing him, almost like wildlife and usually in his car.
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