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Reviews
The Notorious Mr. Bout (2014)
Interesting subject matter, disappointing direction.
Dubbed "the merchant of death," Viktor Bout was many things: an arms dealer, a media celebrity, and an amateur film maker. After years of infamy he was finally arrested in 2011 after falling victim to a C.I.A. sting operation.
What does one look for in a documentary? For me, I look for a film that makes me really think critically about the subject of the film. I felt that at the end of "The Notorious Mr. Bout," I felt no emotion towards the subject of the film; I felt neither sympathy nor condemnation for Mr. Bout, he was merely a mildly interesting character.
"The Notorious Mr. Bout" was an interesting, but ultimately a boring film. There seemed to be a lot of potential however due to the the seeming poor direction and uninteresting interviews the quality of the documentary suffered greatly. One would think that a movie about one of the biggest arms dealers would be fascinating, especially when in the description of the movie they reveal that they show lots of footage from Mr. Bout's own personal films. Yet the documentary portrays him as an extremely boring person who possessed so much hubris that he walked into an obvious trap set up by the C.I.A.
I think the film would have been far more enjoyable had they condensed the information into a shorter, maybe one hour film rather than an hour and a half film as it is now. It seemed almost as if they were trying to fill a certain time slot on TV and so they stretched out the footage into a repetitive one and a half hour documentary.