2012 Flashback: Siege · Killer Sally
And DB, and J.Law
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
In 2009, three unarmed police entered a suburban house in Napier, New Zealand as part of a routine cannabis raid. It was the home of Jan Molenaar, known in Napier for selling weed and clashing with local gang members over the dealing of harder drugs. Molenaar, a bodybuilder with Army Reserve experience, reacted with unexpected force, shooting at the police and attacking civilians. He set off a siege that would last for forty hours and force the town into lockdown. After Molenaar took his own life, officers discovered the house was booby-trapped and contained an illegal cache of weapons and explosives.
The story
Mike Smith’s 2012 made-for-TV thriller Siege — available on Freevee and Tubi, among other places, and not to be confused with a 2021 based-on-a-true-story film of the same name out of Canada — doesn’t spend much time on lighting the fuse. Something bad is going to happen on this sunny, average morning in quiet Napier, but no time is wasted on backstory. Jan Molenaar, dressed in the regulation small-town-New Zealand drug-dealer outfit of dark jeans and a leather vest, walks his dog and complains to his partner Delwyn that his feud with the Mongrel Mob gang is getting serious. Meanwhile, members of the local cop shop prepare for a marijuana bust led by Senior Constable Len Snee. Snee (Darren Young) is clearly well-liked and charismatic, so you know he’s doomed as he strolls into Molenaar’s house.
The normalcy of it all lingers for a few minutes, the way Snee gently chides Delwyn; the moment when Lenny, a would-be customer, pops by only to realise that he’s in the middle of a drug bust and his face falls to the floor; the teddy bears scattered across the furniture. Then Molenaar bursts in, played by Mark Mitchinson as a ball of pure, directed rage. The shooting starts before anyone but Molenaar can comprehend what’s happening. Snee is lying in a pool of blood in the driveway. Another policeman huddles with an injured Lenny in a hedge. Bullets continue to fly in all directions.
There’s no attempt to Joker-ize Molenaar here; while his motives get prodded at briefly, the focus remains on the practical side of trying to dig out a shooter with military training who is willing to take pot shots at everyone, even friends like Lenny. At one point he dons a Ned Kelly helmet, and police chief Sam Hoyle (Joel Tobeck) wonders out loud, “Ned Kelly had a cause. What’s his cause?”
Hoyle is battling to manage the fury of his force and the political pressure coming from the police commissioner. Most of the dialogue is short and snappy exhortations — “Hold!” “Stop!” “Bugger that!” Little time is given to New Zealand’s prohibitive laws around cannabis that have resisted political reform for decades, or on how Molenaar gathered a stash of 18 firearms without anybody noticing.
Made ten years later, this story might linger less on procedure and more on what drove Molenaar to his self-destruction, or spend more time on the aftermath on the small community. (In a tragic twist, both Snee and Molenaar were members of the same Māori tribe, Ngāti Kahungunu.) Siege has some thrilling sequences — a race up a grinding sloped street carrying a wounded man, a bomb scare, and an attempt at gassing Molenaar out of his house. There’s nothing essential to it, but at a brisk 90 minutes it doesn’t waste any time, and is worth sticking on just to enjoy the performances of Miriama Smith as the flinty Delwyn, who has no time for the police but squabbles with Molenaar mid-shooting, and Jim Cumming as the hangdog Lenny, who became a nation’s unlikely hero. — Margaret Howie
Hey, remember that DB Cooper joint I reviewed in April out of the Seattle International Film Festival? Well, it got distribution; the drop date’s a little rando — December 9? k — but it’s headed to theaters and VOD in about five weeks.
Not everyone’s keen to pony up a few bucks when there’s so much true crime already waiting for them on the streaming services they already pay for (or gives a crap about this case, either). Should you bother? From my review:
It’s about 10-15 minutes too long, and if it’s satirizing what passes for fact-check pushback in true-crime docs, it needs to clarify that better — but I Am DB Cooper is trying something, and whether it’s affirmatively ignoring the boundaries of genre or just doesn’t really understand those boundaries very well, the outcome is the same, to wit: a cheerful, raffish assisted crimoir that freshens up a tired major case. I don’t know if you’ll ever get to see it* but if it comes your way, try it.
Here’s the official trailer, if that helps you decide:
Is it essential? Not really — but it’s a snappy change of pace, and I like to highlight some of that less-traveled-by stuff. If you pay for it and hate it, the hotline’s open. — SDB
You may also remember, as I did only dimly, that Jennifer Lawrence had also planned to play Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. But now, it seems, she’s not going to, citing Amanda Seyfried’s The Dropout performance as definitive in a conversation with an NYT reporter. Decider’s Raven Brunner has a few theories on what’s really going on,
Whether this is an act of self-awareness, recognition of audiences’ true crime fatigue (c’mon, two Candy Montgomery docudramas in one year???), or genuine admiration for another actor is still up for question, but it seems like a solid career choice for Lawrence as she just recently returned to acting following a brief hiatus caused by poor critical reception.
but what jumped out to me was the note from Brunner’s write-up that the J.Law version, Adam McKay’s Bad Blood, was announced in 2016. Sometimes these things have a window and miss it; I suspect this is a big part of why Nicolas Cage bailed on that Tiger King project, and that the same factor is driving Lawrence’s decision.
I don’t remember which of the actors’ interpretations I favored back when they were both still Schrödinger’s limited serieses — I bet I liked the idea of Lawrence more, just because she’s taller — but I don’t disagree that Seyfried’s outstanding rendition of Holmes probably made others superfluous. What do you guys think? — SDB
Tip of the deerstalker to our esteemed colleague Rebecca Lavoie, who tweeted about a Monday Baltimore Sun piece on “the two alternative suspects who were improperly cleared by police in the Hae Min Lee murder.”
Here’s a snip:
Baltimore Police considered [a masked, shirtless person of interest from the opening graf] a suspect in Lee’s death at the time, but cleared him after a pair of lie detector tests, the first of which he failed, according to court documents. Then, authorities set their sights on Adnan Syed, Lee’s ex-boyfriend, who ultimately was convicted of murder in 2000.
Twenty-three years later, Syed, who became internationally known due to the popular “Serial” podcast, is free and the man who found the body is one of two people city prosecutors labeled “alternative suspects” in Lee’s killing, according to public records and people familiar with the case who are not authorized to speak publicly about it. While the other suspect has strong ties to Syed and allegedly threatened Lee’s life, this one was a key figure in the original trial and investigation.
Those of y’all who have followed the case more closely over the years will have to help me out with theories on who the “people familiar with the case” might be. Alex Mann and Lee O. Sanderlin’s entire article is worth a read, just for the breadth of coincidences and connections with the suspect but also in the meticulous accounting of the reporting — but if you bump into the paywall, I’d note that as of this writing, you can get a six-month subscription for a buck (plus tax), which is a sweet bargain. — SDB
Oh, and! The poll for the November bonus review is still open! Mash that button! — SDB
The crime
On Valentine’s Day, 1995, bodybuilder Sally “Killer” McNeil turned a shotgun on her husband Ray, also a bodybuilder, killing him. Sally claimed she had shot him in self-defense after years of steroid-implicated abuse; a California jury disagreed.
The story
Killer Sally, a three-part docuseries now on Netflix, comes to us from Nanette Burstein (Hillary; Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee; that 30 For 30 on Tonya Harding), and while it seems like it would have worked better as a feature-length 30 For 30 — or just needed a slight zhuzh of the organizing principle — it’s very watchable and compelling if you don’t know the case, which I did not.
I also didn’t know much about the world of competitive bodybuilding, the difference between amateur competition and going pro, that there’s a whole sort of grey-market situation involving “private time with extremely muscular women” that allows lady bodybuilders to exist financially — and that’s what suggests to me that Killer Sally might have been more its true self as a 30 For 30. But that medium wouldn’t necessarily allow Burstein to touch on all the other aspects of the case, like the difficulty of convincing a jury even today, never mind in the mid-nineties, that a Marine bodybuilder can still be a battered woman, or that a victim isn’t required to be perfect to be a victim.
Or on the enduring PTSD from childhood abuse and military deployments that rippled outward on Sally’s kids over their lifetimes — combined with the separation trauma of having your primary parent incarcerated on the other side of the country (or at all). Or on the tangled choices facing a woman doing time for the killing of her abusive spouse when it’s parole-hearing time: perform rehabilitation by expressing remorse for a crime you don’t believe you committed, so you can get out and try to make up time with your loved ones? or refuse to back down on your contention of self-defense, and not sell yourself and other abuse survivors out no matter what the cost?
Perhaps Killer Sally actually needed more runtime, not less; I wouldn’t have objected if two or three of the capital-I Issues I’ve mentioned here got a few more minutes, certainly. The problem here isn’t that it’s poorly paced or filler-ish. It’s one of those properties that either needed a narrower focus, and a smaller footprint to go with that, or another episode or two — and a little more room to organize itself in a non-chronological way that lets Burstein dig into some subplots. As presented, it’s perfectly good, and given that I didn’t find myself tempted to “read ahead” by Googling during it, it’s maybe in its ideal format already, but sometimes a perfectly good property suggests a road not taken to greatness.
I would consume an entire limited series on the “schmoes” and how a life in amateur bodybuilding is financed; Killer Sally opens a bunch of windows on other topics, which is a good thing. At not quite three hours, it’s not a “commitment sit,” which is also a good thing. I recommend it, and if it’s not for you, you’ll know that within a few minutes. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Our 2012 Flashback Week comes to a close with The Act of Killing.
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