Robert Redford’s latest is a fine looking and produced telling of a fairly unknown story in American history that fails to really excel to anything more than a straight forward court room drama that serves as a parallel to our modern day travails with prosecuting through Guantanamo Bay.

Now you might ask how a movie about Lincoln’s assassins translates to an obvious condemnation of the way the U.S. is handling the prosecuting of modern terrorists.  Redford clearly has something to say and the film’s, and real life, drama surrounds defendants being prosecuted without a jury and instead by a military tribunal.  The ethics of this is something to seriously question as the officers sitting on the judging tribunal are neither unbiased nor uninfluenced by their superiors which will obviously tend to lead to unfair trials.  That is what critics of the way the government is handling the modern day situation will attest to, especially when regarding defendants that really have very little relevance to the enemies cause, and that is where Redford’s film draws its focus.

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