The movie of the summer won’t be in theatres, going instead straight to DVD on June 15.
That’s a shame, because Unthinkable, a ripped from the headlines suspense thriller, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Carrie-Ann Moss, Michael Sheen and Brendan Routh, asks the sorts of questions we should be asking in our era of terror. It has all the hallmarks of an excellent 24 episode, save one — the threat seems far too real and it isn’t clear that the FBI is tough enough to save us.
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The movie opens to grainy footage of Sheen in a warehouse. The camera flickers on, Sheen stammers something, grows dissatisfied and the he turns the camera off. At first blush, these seem like outtakes, until he regains himself. “In the name of Allah, the merciful, and his Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, my name is Yousef Atta Mohammed. My former name is Stephen Arthur Younger.”
It’s a scene we’ve seen before – on the news, but never from Hollywood. Younger is all American: ex-military, a Muslim convert, and a nuclear weapons specialist, who has placed three nuclear weapons in three American cities. Paid by Iran to smuggle fissionable material out of Russia, he went rogue, surfacing once more in America where he allowed himself to be captured. He is our very worst fear, a fear which seems all too plausible after Ft. Hood.
If Younger is our worst fear, then careerist FBI Agent Helen Brody (Moss) is his greatest enabler and black ops interrogator “H” (Samuel L. Jackson) our best hope. Tasked to find the three bombs, Brody and H lead an interrogation team to get Younger to talk. Their approaches couldn’t be more different. To get to the truth, H tortures him, while Brody coddles him, revealing, at last, America’s schizophrenic position on torture and self-preservation. This is not a conflict with radical Islam; it is a conflict over to what extents we will preserve our civilization against its most nihilistic enemies.
**MAJOR SPOILERS**
Which, as H reminds us, is not the terrorist, but Agent Brody. She has the kind of impeccable credentials that the ACLU would love for every FBI agent to have. She’s a careerist Harvard Law graduate who chose career over family. She exudes multiculturalism, telling Younger that she admires the Koran, and that, after one torture session, he is “one of the bravest men I know.”
Consistently, she waxes about the Geneva Convention, the illegality of it all, and she, along with her boss, promise that when it is all over with, they’ll bring a civil rights prosecution against H and the government for torturing a guy who wants to kill millions of Americans. Indeed, her first encounter with Younger, she tells him that his “situation here is illegal” and that she’s “going to get you out of here so you can talk.”
In lines that could have been written by Andrew Sullivan, Moss tells him that he’s not “going to get any “information” anyways, “You do this and he’ll say anything and none of it will be true. Physical torture doesn’t work.”
To which H, dismantling the fashionable “torture-doesn’t-work” lie, replies, “So I guess that’s why they have been using it since the beginning of human history, huh? For fun?”
H tells her, “It’s not about the enemy. It’s about us. Our weakness. We’re on the losing side, Helen. We’re afraid, they are not. We have doubt, they believe.” He asks her how many lives our values have cost. Later, she tells him that everyone wants to be free, only to have H rebut, that not everyone wants to be free.
How right he is.
That, unfortunately, is the closest the film gets to seriously considering the morality of torture or our tepid response to evil.
The film doesn’t seriously consider that H might be doing good. He is, instead, seen as something of a necessary evil, sanctioned by the government but never applauded for being essential. At times, he even accepts this role, easily, telling Younger that there is no good in the world, only defeat and victory. As the clock ticks down and the bombs seem ready to go off, H asks the only decent person in the room – Brody – if he can torture Younger’s children to find the location of a probable fourth bomb.
She tells him emphatically, “We can’t do this. We’re f—ing humans. Let the bomb go off!” H nods and the final scene shows the bomb counting down to zero and then fading to black.
Never has a better argument been made for the essential nihilism of the Left. They tell us, “We’re so civilized that we’re willing to let our civilization go up in a mushroom cloud.” And go up in smoke it will.
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