How To Blow Up A Pipeline - Movie Review

Critics Score - 8 of 10

General Audience Score - 7 of 10

Anybody remember the Russell Crowe film from over a decade ago, The Next Three Days? That movie was fascinating in a particular way, it took a common plot device of countless TV shows and movies, a prison break, stripped it down and portrayed it in the most realistic way I’ve ever seen. Well a new movie from Neon does the same thing with a less common theme, creating an explosive device to blow up an oil company pipeline. I can’t imagine many oil company executives are excited to check out the simply titled How To Blow Up A Pipeline, but maybe they’ve got a morbid curiosity about how someone would go about it. This film lays that out, along with any and all motivations that someone would have to carry out such an attack, although it’s just for entertainment purposes, it does feel incredibly anti-gas and oil company and very pro-climate movement. Despite the film’s seemingly biased assessment of the global situation, the shocking realism the film works with in describing, almost step by step how someone could pull off such an attack, it’s not only shocking and disquieting, but also enrapturing. There are no Hollywood stars here, but the cast’s mostly unrecognizable faces only adds to help us buy what this film is selling. And what it’s selling is dynamite, quite literally, it’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline. 

SYNOPSIS - We begin with the camera perched behind a young woman, probably in her early to mid twenties, we only see the back of her brown coat with a red hood as she walks down the sidewalk. Her name is Xochitl (Ariela Barer), and as she continues, what looks like a gray Cadillac SUV is parked on the street to her left, as she gets near it, she produces a knife from her pocket and we hear it click as the blade extends. We hear sirens in the distance, she looks around a moment before crouching and slashing the two tires on the side of the vehicle and then placing a yellow note under the windshield wiper. While the camera doesn’t linger long enough on the note to read it’s entirety, we see the heading, “Why I sabotaged your property”, then some info about climate change affecting communities around the world, the vehicle owners gas guzzling preferences, then a line in bold reading, “If the law will not punish you, we will.” The scene cuts and we’re in a grocery store, a young man of Native American decent named Michael (Forrest Goodluck) is working at the checkout before another behind the head tracking camera shot follows him into the back room. He grabs a duffle bag, removes a phone from it and texts a simple message, “56 hours”. This film works hard to remain ambiguous through the first act, almost to the point of being confusing. But it progressively drops puzzle pieces on the table that we’re left to sort out, we’re introduced to the film’s players, given information on their backstories and slowly begin to deduce what their motivations are and what their roles in this scheme will be.

We continue to meet our band of misfits, Alisha (Jayme Lawson) is working as a maid cleaning a big house, Shawn (Marcus Scribner) climbs into a van with Xochitl carrying a duffel bag of snacks and then we catch up with Theo (Sasha Lane) as she’s holding onto a toilet and vomiting at some kind of AA meeting or group therapy session. As an audience, we’re bouncing around like a ping pong ball narratively, we’ve got a lot of players to meet and background stories to catch up with to help us get a handle on how this plan is going to come together. Of the remaining crew, the last one we meet is the buzz cut wearing, husband and father of two little girls, Dwayne (Jake Weary), and like any good Texas rancher, he tucks his pistol into his belt holster and kisses his wife goodbye. After the introductions, at around six minutes in, the title drops in big red letters against a black screen with resounding bass blaring in the back. But a scene opens, we see “West Texas” come across the screen and we see a rundown old house in the middle of nowhere with a beat up blue van parked outside, the base of operations for the building of a large explosive. As the film rather quickly moves into the process of the bomb’s construction, we’re periodically given flashbacks into the character’s pasts and clue into how they acquired the skills that most of us would associate with terrorism. As they move forward in their plans to detonate a large bomb, there is no escaping the steamroller of tension that builds up and the hyper-realism of it all pulls us in as we careen towards the finale.

The direction of How To Build A Pipeline is simple yet effective, director Daniel Goldhaber is able to tell this story with some competency, although it isn’t exactly streamlined due to the jerky nature of the screenplay. I don’t know that the screenplay could’ve managed to juggle all these characters and stories better, it’s a tall order to establish all these storylines and then tie them together while pushing the main plot forward. This film works with mostly unknown actors and actresses who are all all doing solid work, with Jake Weary rising above the rest of the pack, but mainly because he’s one of the only ones with whom we can make any kind of a connection. And this aspect of the film is really where it falters. When it tries to establish emotional stakes, at a little less than a hour and forty-five minutes runtime, we just don’t spend enough time with these characters to build up any kind of emotional investment, we’re left bouncing from one to the next from the start. While the sub two hour run assists heavily in keeping up a sustained tension and pacing, it takes the film’s attempts to establish any emotional stakes for these characters and effectively throws them out the window. This film is as engaging as the best of them on an intellectual level, but stays in the shallow end of the character building pool. As soon as the film begins, it immediately introduces an effective tension building score, like Contagion or Inception or another thriller, only just not quite as memorable. The cinematography of the film was also peculiar, not necessarily in a good way either. Most of the camera work was pretty standard for a lower budgeted film, but at a couple points the camera pans around the individuals in a way that was unusual and almost disorienting, but some may not even notice it. This is a movie that can captivate most audiences, but critics especially will love it and despite it’s struggling attempts to engage at an emotional level, it’ll probably make it onto some critic’s list of favorite films of 2023.

SUMMARY - This film is a well executed, high octane thriller that unlike the Fast & Furious films and many of the summer blockbusters coming up, it takes movie fiction and brings it into the realm of reality that we live in. Despite some of it’s perceived faults, How To Blow Up A Pipeline builds up an impressive amount of tension within this realism and in the end it definitely goes off with a bang.