Movie Review

MLK/FBI puts civil rights leader and agency under a microscope

The film is based on David Garrow’s 1981 book The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Photo courtesy of IFC Films

Few Americans are more admired than slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet at the same time, he was a man whose personal life was, shall we say, complicated, and whose activities drew the attention — warranted or unwarranted — of the FBI for a good portion of his life.

All of that is examined in the new documentary MLK/FBI, which uses FBI documents that were declassified in 2019 as the jumping-off point to try to understand why the agency put King under such scrutiny. Directed by Sam Pollard, the film is based on David Garrow’s 1981 book The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., a subject he explored further in an article after the declassified documents were released.

Garrow is one of eight people who is interviewed for the film, although Pollard makes the unusual choice of not showing any of the interviewees on camera. Instead, all the audience sees is a brief chyron with a person’s name while historical footage, photos, and movies about the FBI are rolled out as visuals. While we occasionally get to see video of King and other figures of the time speaking, the majority of the film is silent while the faceless interviewees speak, a technique that is not very dynamic and gets repetitive.

Pollard and his team do their best to approach the film in an even-handed manner. They show how many people in the U.S. at the time were still in fear of Communism taking over, and how the FBI capitalized on that fear to paint King with a red brush, using an association with suspected Communist Stanley Levison as justification to start surveilling him. Naturally, good old-fashioned racism played no small part in their attention, with King’s rise and cause in general seen as detrimental by many white people.

Surveillance eventually turned to wiretaps on King’s and his associates' phones, as well as informants embedded with him, and it was then that they discovered what is now common knowledge: That King was unfaithful to his wife. The FBI tried to exploit this information to undermine King’s moral authority in a variety of ways, most distastefully when they sent a supposed recording of King with another woman to his house, along with a letter suggesting that he kill himself.

The interviewees, which also include King confidants/friends Andrew Young and Clarence Jones, historians Beverly Gage and Donna Murch, and former FBI agent Charles Knox, give some insight into this history, although the format of the film hampers them. Because the footage often doesn’t match exactly what a person is talking about, viewers may find themselves losing the thread of a specific point being made. There’s something to be said for not going the traditional “talking head” route with a documentary, but Pollard may have leaned too far in the opposite direction.

The level of hatred aimed at King late in his life, especially when he took a public stance against the war in Vietnam, is both easy and difficult to believe. But the fact that this loathing was so well-known and that the FBI had constant surveillance on King at the time of his assassination calls into question why they couldn’t have prevented it. The film insinuates that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing him, may not have been to blame, but stops short of outright accusing the FBI of being involved.

Some may not want to watch a documentary that’s not a complete veneration of King, especially on the weekend preceding the holiday with his name on it. But MLK/FBI is an important, if imperfect, look at a slice of history that many may not know well.

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MLK/FBI is screening in select theaters and is available via premium video on demand.

Movie Review

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first but not by much

Five Nights at Freddy's 2

Blumhouse

Five Nights at Freddy's 2

Blumhouse Productions first made their name with the Paranormal Activity series, establishing themselves as a leader in the horror genre thanks to their relatively cheap yet effective movies. In recent years, they’ve added on “soft” horror films likeM3GAN and Five Nights at Freddy’s to draw in a younger audience, with both films becoming so successful that each was quickly given a sequel.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 finds Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) still recovering from the events of the first film, with Abby particularly missing her “friends.” Those friends just so happen to be the souls of murdered children who inhabit animatronic characters at the long-defunct Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, children who were abducted and killed by William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

A new threat emerges at another Freddy Fazbear’s location in the form of Charlotte, another murdered child who inhabits a creepy large marionette. Mike, distracted by a possible romance with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), fails to keep track of Abby, who makes her way to the old pizzeria and inadvertently unleashes Charlotte and her minions on the surrounding town.

Directed by Emma Tammi and written by Scott Cawthon (who also created the video game on which the series is based), the film tries to mix together goofy elements with intense scenes. One particular sequence, in which the security guard for Freddy Fazbear’s lets a group of ghost hunters onto the property, toes the line between soft and hard horror. That and a few others show the potential that the filmmakers had if they had stuck to their guns.

Unfortunately, more often than not they either soft-pedal things that would normally be horrific, or can’t figure out how to properly stage scenes. The sight of animatronic robots wreaking havoc is one that is simultaneously frightening and laughable, and the filmmakers never seem to find the right balance in tone. Every step in the direction of making a truly scary horror film is undercut by another in which the robots fail to live up to their promise.

It doesn’t help that Cawthon gives the cast some extremely wooden dialogue, lines that none of the actors can elevate. What may work in a video game format comes off as stilted when said by actors in a live-action film. The story also loses momentum quickly after the first half hour or so, with Cawthon seemingly content to just have characters move from place to place with no sense of connection between any of the scenes.

Hutcherson (The Hunger Games series), after being the true lead of the first film, is given very little to do in this film, and his effort is equal to his character’s arc. The same goes for Lail, whose character seems to be shoehorned into the story. Rubio is called upon to carry the load for a lot of the movie, and the teenager is not quite up to the task. A brief appearance by Skeet Ulrich seems to be a blatant appeal to Scream fans, but he and Lillard only underscore how limited this film is compared to that franchise.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first film, but not by much. The filmmakers do a decent job of making the new marionette character into a great villain, but they fail to capitalize on its inherent creepiness. Instead, they fall back on less effective elements, ensuring that the film will be forgettable for anyone other than hardcore Freddy fans.

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Five Nights at Freddy's 2 opens in theaters on December 5.

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