DVD Review - Interview with the Assassin

Today's review is of the creepy fake documentary ("mockumentary" is too jokey a description for this movie)Interview with the Assassin, starring Raymond J. Barry and Dylan Haggerty. Barry, an accomplished character actor, plays ex-Marine Walter Ohliger. Ohlinger is dying of cancer and wants to confess his most major of crimes to Haggerty's Ron Kobeleski, a recently laid off TV cameraman. The confession is that Ohlinger was the second gunman on the grassy knoll, and that he, not Lee Harvey Oswald, fired the head shot that killed John F. Kennedy.

The film does an excellent job of keeping this film grounded in reality, although the premise is one that could have easily lead to an unbelievable action movie or thriller. It is shot very much like a documentary, never once tipping it's hand to the fact that everything on screen is being faked by extremely gifted actors.

While Ohlinger and Kobeleski spend the entire movie trying to prove the sniper's story, in the end it is left up to the viewer whether Walter is telling the truth, or just a crazy old man looking for attention. Unlike Push (below is my review for that movie), this is not done in a cheesy way. Everything in this film feels very true to life.

The film was the first written and directed by Neil Burger, who later went on to write and direct The Illusionist. Very rarely does a writer/director so thoroughly hit one out of the park on his first feature, but Burger has accomplished that here. The film was shot with only about $750,000, but that's more to it's advantage than it's detriment. The plot has many twists and turns that surprise as well as any other movie I've seen, and the small budget helps sell the whole premise so completely that I might have been suckered in had I seen this movie without knowing anything about it, and had I not recognized it's stars.
Grade: 9
(All films are graded on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being cinematic perfection and 1 being about as bad as a Sci-Fi Channel Original Picture.)