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‘McVeigh’ Review: A Drama About the Oklahoma City Bomber Has Low-Key Sociopathic Atmosphere to Spare
Alfie Allen gives Timothy McVeigh a convincing impassive surface, but the film should have dug more into the timely extremity of his alt-right ideas.
There are scenes with McVeigh and his friend, Terry Nichols (Brett Gelman), with whom he planned the Oklahoma City bombing, but even when they’re purchasing bags of nitromethane and piling it into a storage shed, they’re not exactly chatty about how any of this is going to go down. The monosyllabic sullenness is meant to convey something to the viewer: the gaping distance between what these people were actually doing (engaging in an action that was sociopathic, homicidal, and utterly senseless) and what they thought they were doing (using terrorism to nurture “the tree of liberty”). I’m thinking of movies like “Dahmer” (2002), the film that put Jeremy Renner on the map; “Chapter 27” (2007), a look at the hideous journey of Mark David Chapman; and “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” (2019), in which Zac Efron played Ted Bundy (superbly).
Or read this on Variety
