77 Minutes (2016)
*** (out of 4)
This documentary takes a look at the 1984 San Ysidro massacre where a gunman entered a McDonalds and eventually killed twenty-one people in seventy-seven minutes before he was shot by a sniper.
77 MINUTES is a documentary that I have mixed feelings on. As with most documentaries, the filmmaker certainly has an opinion on the subject and director Charlie Minn has no problem putting himself on screen. We hear him asking questions. We often see him asking the questions. The film even ends with him questioning what happened that day.
I'll get the good stuff out of the way first. The film does a very good job at taking a look at a tragic event and I thought it was great that it focused on the victims. We get to hear some heroic stories from that day and we also get to see the damage that the survivors had. The documentary pays a nice tribute to those people and it makes the right decision not to say the killer's name. These stories are heartbreaking and rather depressing to listen to but they are well told.
The controversy comes from two things. One, the director decided to show the actual police video, which includes a look at all of the dead bodies including an eight-month-old baby. These images are hard to look at and I'm sure most people would rather hit the FF button rather than look at them and that's understandable. I don't think the director was doing it to exploit the victims but to show how bad the carnage was.
The biggest issue I had with the film is the fact that the director decides to play a "Monday morning quarterback" and goes after the police. He constantly attacks the police and their decisions on that day and he even goes as far to attack a few of the people he is interviewing. To me this was just downright stupid and some of the questions were poorly done. I mean, what would you tell the victims today? Really? Clearly the director wanted the police to know they were the cause for this and this whole mentality was rather stupid to me.
Even more stupid was the final message right before the credits where the director attacks the police even more. It really seemed like the director was looking at this 1984 event as something that happened today. Things were a lot different back then and not everything was handled the same way. Mass shootings weren't common in 1984 so obviously they were handled differently. I understand not naming the killer but to attack the police more than the psycho who went in there and did the killing was just stupid.
