Movie Review: McVEIGH

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 21st, 2025 / 07:18 AM

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Alfie Allen, Brett Gelman, Ashley Benson, Anthony Carrigan, Tracy Letts
Writers: Mike Ott and Alex Giolakis
Director: Mike Ott
Distributor: DECAL
Release Date: March 21, 2025

There are certain films where it’s hard to guess the target audience. With McVEIGH, this is especially difficult, as the title suggests viewers will be familiar with Timothy McVeigh and his actions, but it plays out as a slow-burn thriller that seems like we won’t know where it’s going.

This is topped off by the standard but absolutely baffling in this case end credits disclaimer: “The characters and events portrayed in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.”

Not only are real persons and real events portrayed here, there is plentiful real-world news footage (if images of real buildings collapsing is triggering, consider this a warning).

Without further information, we can’t know if this is meant to be ironic, or to indicate that there is a lot of dramatization, or some other intent entirely.

Spoiler alert for those who haven’t heard of Timothy McVeigh: he committed what remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history on April 19, 1995, by detonating a bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, which headquartered several U.S. government agencies. 168 people were killed, including nineteen children, and another 684 persons were injured.

McVEIGH starts with Timothy McVeigh (Alfie Allen), already paranoid enough to use a fake last name at gun shows, hawking anti-government bumper stickers. Like a lot of folks, he is enraged by the fatal showdown between the Branch Davidian compound and the ATF almost two years earlier in Waco, Texas.

Unlike most of those folks, Timothy also looks up to death row inmate Richard (Tracy Letts), an unapologetic murderer motivated by racism and anti-Semitism.

The screenplay by director Mike Ott and Alex Giolakis follows Timothy as he contemplates what he wants to do and gets into a loose relationship with waitress Cindy (Ashley Benson).

Timothy isn’t much of a talker. His friend Terry Nichols (Brett Gelman) is, but he mostly chats about his Filipino wife and his digestion problems. We get a general sense of grievance, but nothing to indicate why they’re different from other disgruntled anti-government types. We have no better notion of what got them to this point at the end than we do at the beginning.

McVEIGH is well-made, in the sense that the dialogue and behavior is all credible, the performances are good, and the imagery is consistently bleakly handsome. We are shown the relative ease with which McVeigh finds compatriots and materials to carry out his plans in the pre-Internet age. This is unsettling, but the film as a whole is surprisingly unilluminating.

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A possibly fictitious look at events leading up to a real-life bombing

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Article: Movie Review: MCVEIGH

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