Here is a fiercely watchable thriller which had me biting my nails down to the wrists. It is inspired partly by Andreas Malm’s radical eco-activist manifesto of the same title, and partly – in fact, almost pedantically – by the heist classic Reservoir Dogs. A young crew of protesters, each individually getting a backstory flashback which sometimes jumps into the drama at a cliffhanger moment, come together for the big job, knowing each other as little as Tarantino’s colour-coded bad guys and having similar issues around gunshot wound injury and possible disloyalty.
Director and co-screenwriter Daniel Goldhaber applies a fictional imagination to the first two words in the title of Malm’s book, which argues for direct-action property destruction but is not actually a “how to” bomb-making guide like William Powell’s 1971 gonzo classic The Anarchist Cookbook; it is still in print and still assuredly being studied by climate activists. Goldhaber’s drama shows how this kind of paramilitary adventure might actually happen, month by month, moment by moment, as well as the kind of people who would be sufficiently motivated or reckless to risk decades in federal prison. They are all drawn together by a plan to blow up a west Texas oil pipeline, disrupt the flow and drive its price ruinously up.
