Review by John Packman.

Exactly how severely can you torture someone and still get away with not calling it torture? That's the question looming over Alex Gibney's (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) impressive documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, an investigation of the questionable-at-best methods used by the U.S. to extract information from alleged prisoners of the 'War on Terror'. Gibney has amassed an intimidating amount of data on the interrogation techniques used by officers of such notorious prisons as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Additionally, Gibney is given a surprising amount of access to the offending officers themselves, who are astonishingly candid about their complicity in the deaths of prisoners. The resulting picture is not a pretty one: America arrests 'suspected' terrorists who are more often than not turned over by third parties for a bounty, tortures these suspects routinely, and holds them indefinitely without trial.

This clear violation of Geneva Conventions and the's country's own Constitution is exacerbated by the cover that the nebulously-defined term 'national security' provides: essentially, knowing the truth about the government's conduct damages their ability to govern. This laughable irony is reinforced pretty much every time Donald Rumsfeld appears onscreen in file footage, which is to say 'a lot'. Gibney is remarkably even-handed compared to most political documentarians these days, focusing on redacted documents and undisputed statistics rather than anecdotal evidence and rhetoric to make his case. The film occasionally retreads its own ground - it could have been at least fifteen minutes shorter - and relies on distracting interstitials and spooky music, but stylistic quibbles are relatively unimportant when a documentary asks this many pertinent questions and asks them well.

Taxi to the Dark Side
Alex Gibney | USA | 2007 | 105min

Thur. Oct. 4 | 12:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Tue. Oct. 9 | 7:00pm | Ridge Theatre
Wed. Oct. 10 | 3:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre