Movie Details

Thomas Flynn is just a guy who runs a cafe in Brooklyn; but his insistence that 9/11 was a government conspiracy turns his world upside down. When he’s implicated in the death of a friend, Flynn is flung on a calamitous journey full of mortal dangers, shocking secrets, and government agents hot on his trail. Can he reveal the truth before it’s too late?

Cast and Credits

Starring: Elina Lowensohn, Adam Nee, Michael J. Burg, Tamara Knausz, Gregory Paul Martin
Directed by: Dave Herman
Release Year: 2008

Movie Trailer

• Paul Krik

  REVIEW FROM FILM JOURNAL OF
  ABLE DANGER
  Rated:NR

  Like a tsunami or an earthquake, the well-documented corruption, cronyism and deception of the Bush administration has been so overwhelming and catastrophic that as a nation we’re pretty much too stunned-simple to even process it anymore. What other explanation for the World Trade Center attack having come under a Republican president who’d politicized the FBI and other agencies, packing them with inept loyalists, who yet somehow convinced us that Republicans are the better of the two parties at preventing terrorism? Hello?

  In the face of such up-is-down, black-is-white manipulation—and that was just one small example, Brownie—one refuge is absurdity. Writer-director Dave Herman, a.k.a. Paul Krik, understands this. Make a serious drama suggesting the Bush administration had complicity in 9/11, and you risk jeers as if suggesting the Earth is flat. Make a mildly surreal, mostly black-and-white homage to film noir, set in the built-in ironic enclave of hipster Brooklyn, and you can say all sorts of things, some of them maybe even true.

  Opening with ominous imagery and lettering inspired by Soviet-era propaganda posters, and moving to grainy surveillance-video footage with Terminator-like screen text ID’ing individuals and listing courses of action, Able Danger establishes a mood that’s both wearily resigned to the privacy-eroding parade of security cameras that now capture our every public step and over-the-top enough to lull you into the comfort zone of satire. But the titular Able Danger was a very real, classified intelligence project begun by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in late 1999 to develop a plan to combat international terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in particular. Its existence became public in 2005, after the project was terminated, and while it’s unclear whether it did identify one of the 9/11 masterminds, Mohamed Atta, as its proponents claim, it seems all too clear that its findings were suppressed and its personnel stonewalled, adding one more layer of mystery to the WTC attack.

  The what-if scenario here involves modern-day versions of film noir archetypes (with old-fashioned rat-a-tag dialog), as opposed to being neo-noir, which lays modern-day mannerisms onto the genre’s classic themes. As always, you’ve got the well-meaning schlub—in this case, lefty coffeehouse/performance-space owner Thomas Flynn (Adam Nee)—who gets suckered by some mysterious damsel-in-distress—in this case, the pseudonymous Birgit Weber (Elina Löwensohn). As for the stuff dreams are made of, here it’s a hard drive containing some MacGuffin or other. Flynn publishes a 9/11 conspiracy-theory website, and when his friend and partner Nathan (Brandon Bales) is killed while escorting the dame to a meeting with some shady European with ties to Atta, well, when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.

  That something leads poor sap Thomas into the bowels of danger he’s not able to readily avoid. Another friend is killed; Thomas gets tazed, man; Birgit Weber is really Kasia Fuchs; and darned if the effete operative Axel (Michael J. Burg) isn’t Joel Cairo gone German. Nee gives a well-constrained performance as a fanatical idealist with tough-nerd swagger, who really is in over his head, and the Bucharest-born Löwensohn, as always, rivets you to her every scene and slinky move. Her Birgit/Kasia is a not-quite-undead emotional vampire, whose wide, world-weary eyes are her fangs. And in Herman/Krik’s vision of Brooklyn, these two souls exist in a borough so sad and strange that Jesus watches through many icons but doesn’t lift a finger to help.

  That’s probably just cosmic indifference, or maybe everything here is so odd and disturbing, He simply wants to see what happens next. Despite some low-budget shortcomings—the audio can be muddy, the music occasionally bombastic, and some shots here and there might have benefited from a few more takes—Able Danger is a smart and all-too-conceivable conspiracy thriller that raises serious questions in less-than-serious ways. Do we really think we know the entire truth behind 9/11? If so, the movie shows a bridge it might want to sell you….

  Critic: Frank Lovece
  http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/reviews/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003849095

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