Dion Yates

If I'm offering spoilers here, so does every other review you'll come across. It's basically 'if you could go back in time would you kill Hitler', with an American white supremacist as the embodiment of evil. The message is so 'timely' and so clumsily delivered I'm surprised the misunderstood heroine of the tale didn't whack Donald Trump. The first half hour is tense and intriguing. But the cat and mouse game, delivering very few crumbs of information until the last fifteen minutes, becomes increasingly tedious. It's also interesting just how illiberal the movie's ultimate message is: it's about erasing 'bad' ideas before they take root in people's minds. Such ideas may be innocuous initially, becoming distorted or interpreted poorly and resulting in fascism or mayhem. But how do we know the true potential of an idea until it's run through an organic cycle? The organisation's use of terrorism, motivated by racist ideals, seems too convenient a way of rationalising the denial of people's rights to think for themselves, to ponder unpopular ideas and make their own minds up. The final image of 'hope' (in a mixed race baby, to really hammer the point home) and swelling soundtrack makes the sneaky coerciveness of the movie's message more pernicious, and more cowardly in how it deals with the complex issues of free thought and free speech.