Hollywood Elites Blast Clint Eastwood's Film for Not Portraying "Sympathetic Terrorist"
Islamic terrorist Ayoub El-Khazzani boarded a train headed from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015, wielding an AK-47 rifle, handgun and box-cutter, with the goal of murdering innocent passengers in a jihadist attack.
Little did he know, there were three Americans on that train — Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone. When the jihadist experienced difficulties operating his rifle, these brave men sprang into action, thwarting the attack and saving countless lives.
The heroic actions of those three friends was recorded in a book that was then adapted into a film by conservative Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood. Eastwood cast the three friends to play themselves in a movie portraying their bravery.
Despite all this, elitist Hollywood liberals have found reason to hate it, as was evidenced by numerous reviews of the film by left-leaning media outlets, according to Hollywood In Toto.
Liberal film reviewers had already made their opinions of Eastwood and American patriotism known following the 2014 release of “American Sniper,” but they have reiterated their anti-Americanism and sympathy toward Islamic extremists in their reviews of “The 15:17 To Paris.”
The reviewer for the National Post complained that the movie was akin to sitting through somebody else’s vacation, and lamented that the terrorist didn’t receive enough screen time. He wrote: “15:17 to Paris overly simplifies the attack and its aftermath. The terrorist (Ray Corasani) snarls and wears sneakers, but there’s little more to him.”
The reviewer for Slate also griped about feeling like he was watching a slideshow of another person’s vacation in Europe, and took up too much of the film too boot, and wrote, “The sense of wheelspinning only underlines the movie’s failure to make its antagonist more than a cartoon scowl with a Kalashnikov. The geese in Sully (a Tom Hanks film about a passenger jet which crash landed on the Hudson River) were more well-rounded characters.”
The Slant Magazine reviewer, when not sneering at conservatives, Christianity, the military and Eastwood’s method of film-making, took issue with the film’s departure from the “surprisingly visceral and nuanced book,” and wrote, “One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view—including El-Khazzani’s—and which is reduced by (screenwriter) Dorothy Blyskal’s script to cut-and-pasted bromides.”
Over at The Daily Beast, the reviewer stated that the film was “more mind-numbing than his empty chair speech” and called it a “stunning misfire.” Of the terrorist, he wrote, “As for the villain in question, Eastwood primarily films his hands, sneakers, arms, and back, all as a means of making him some sort of faceless existential threat — a symbolic vehicle for Stone’s ‘greater purpose.’ Mostly, though, it’s just another example of The 15:17 to Paris’ regrettable blankness.”
What these reviewers all seem to have missed is that the movie was intended to tell the story of the three heroes that day, and not the story of the bad guy those heroes defeated. But it wasn’t just the lack of character development of the terrorist that reviewers took issue with, as others used their reviews to take shots at American patriotism, Christianity, President Donald Trump and our nation’s gun culture.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review, which did lament the exclusion of “any hint of the terrorist’s motivation,” led the way with an open bashing of American patriotism combined with a not-so-subtle shot at Trump, and wrote, “There’s a certain repellent hubris about (Eastwood’s) patriotic formula: Make America grate again, on the rest of the world, in paint-by-numbers (red, white and blue), which happen to be the same as the Tricouleur — not that Mr. Eastwood makes any use or reference to that.”
The reviewer for the The U.K. Daily Mail wrote of the three heroes, “In that sacred American way, incidentally, their Christianity is not incompatible with an obsession with firearms,” and continued with, “The narrative throbs with Eastwood’s conviction — shared, as we know, by President Trump — that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Better still, a good guy with a gun and a bible.”
Last, but certainly not least, we have the review from The New Yorker, in which the reviewer called the film a “reactionary fable” and described a scene in which a young Sadler and Stone play with an “arsenal” of toy guns, about which the reviewer wrote, “As I watched the scene, I thought, You could cut it out of this movie and paste it, unchanged, into another one, about a nice suburban kid who grows up and carries out a mass shooting.”
That New Yorker reviewer also criticized the lack of answers to questions about the terrorist, and wrote, “Was this not an ideal opportunity to trace the paths — whether of grievance, paranoia, faith, or wrath — that lead a young man to dreams of slaughter? Was he not, in his way, catapulted toward his purpose no less firmly than Stone and his companions were, and with an equally fervent belief that he was obeying the decrees of his God?”
Over at Truth Revolt, who also took note of the terrorist-sympathizing reviews, one commenter summed it all up with a rather provocative “thought experiment” that simply must be shared: “Amtrak train, Northeast Corridor, people commuting between NY/Phil and Washington. Some ‘White Nationalist’ whips out a gun and announces he’s going to blow away ‘all you Lefties, Jews and people of color.’ He’s overpowered by some people who unaccountably have become courageous in their old age. How much sympathetic treatment would these critics want for THAT character in a film of the incident?”
I think we already know exactly how that would play out in today’s liberal media.
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