DVD Review: Suicide Killers
Suicide Killers (2006)–*1/2
I don’t like Suicide Killers for two reasons. First, the film, a documentary investigating the motivations of Muslim suicide bomber, doesn’t do much more than offer a sampling of what could have been examined. It’s like ordering every appetizer on the menu and never getting to the entrée.
Second, and the one that I find more alarming, is that it made me laugh more times than it made me think. Suicide Killers is comically sensationalist, but that comes with the territory if you’re model for filmmaking is a 1990s slasher movie.
Slasher movie? In one scene, a pounding sound can be heard each time a dramatic statement is made, like boom of a synthesizer in Scream. It’s just one of the many techniques that over-dramatize something that is by definition dramatic. We get snippets of interviews from would-be suicide bombers in an Israeli containment facility. Each wannabe killer with his or her on screen, under which is the caption “Failed TERROR Bomber.” Apparently, the filmmaker is using chat room screaming to remind us that terror is something we haven’t learned to fear in the wake of 9/11, 7/7 and the Madrid train bombings.
We don’t gain much from listening to the rantings of failed suicide bombers, I mention above. It’s mostly the usual talk of paradise and “seventy-two virgins.” Even the so-called masterminds of these bombing provide little insight into the workings of a suicide bomber’s mind. Instead of only forcing the viewer to sit through one or two different interviews, to give single entry point, we are bombarded by repetitive statements from brain-washed fanatics.
There are terrorism experts interviewed in the film, but their voices of reason get drowned out by the sole urge to make Islamists look crazy. Trivial quotes about oppressed sexuality and socio-economic problems in Muslim countries are never given time to sink in because we are always back to listening to a suicide bomber. Sometimes we hear from a victim who recounts his or her story for added shock value, but the film never works.
In a world were the topic of suicide bombers is already covered in countless narrative films, documentaries and cable news specials, it’s not asking too much for Suicide Killers to offer something new. It’s hardly fresh enough to be screened on the Fox News Channel on a Sunday afternoon.
Suicide Killers isn’t the usual FNC propaganda. Though, I kind of wish it was. At least then I could blame its bad interviews and action as stagy as a The Daily Show feature on a solid agenda. The DVD cover does assert that the film is “trying to dispel the ‘myths’ of the Palestinian Authority,” but watching the film proves Suicide Killers doesn’t know what it’s trying to accomplish. It’s a documentary that bits off more than it can chew, and we’re the ones who have to choke on it.
Get Email Updates
