JFK: The Smoking Gun
JFK: The Smoking Gun
| 15 November 2013 (USA)
JFK: The Smoking Gun Trailers

Seventy-five percent of the American people still refuse to believe the official story of President John F. Kennedy's death. They do not think he was killed by a lone gunman but by a mysterious cabal that somehow conspired to have him killed. How can this be? How can a crime this famous, witnessed and investigated by so many, remain a mystery? This is what veteran Australian police detective Colin McLaren is determined to find out. JFK: The Smoking Gun follows the forensic cold-case investigation McLaren conducted over four painstaking years, taking us back to that tragic day in Dallas at Dealey Plaza where the shooting took place, to Parkland Hospital where the president was pronounced dead, to the Bethesda Naval Hospital where the autopsy was conducted and to the conclusions of the Warren Commission that have remained controversial to this day.

Reviews
Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.
Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict
Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
David Spear So after Oswald fired his first shot, Hickey identified that JFK was shot, looked up at the 6th floor, reached down for the AR-15, lifted it from his car floor, released the safety, turned the rifle toward JFK rather than the 6th floor, and accidentally shoots JFK.And he does all this in under 6 seconds! Yeah, right. The movie also doesn't talk about the type of bullet the AR-15 fires and if there is any indication of that bullet entering the back of JFK's head at the proper angle. This theory is so bad that I suspect it is a deliberate fake that can be proven wrong. I'm sure the assassination was a conspiracy, but not this.
FlushingCaps It's impossible to only review this as a film and ignore the story--the theory about the assassination presented.As a film, the "actors" doing the re-created scenes were miserable. There was way too much repetition, making the film seem padded--to fill out the 2 hours including commercials.As to the theory--there are two reactions I had--chortling and shaking my head in amazement.We are supposed to believe that the third shot did not come from Oswald's gun, but from a rifle fired by accident by a Secret Serviceman sitting, rather, standing in the car right behind the president's car. Presented in the film is the notion that on hearing the first shot, this agent reached down and picked up a rifle on the floor, then when the car sped up after the second shot, the agent fell backwards and his rifle just happened to be fired by accident right during the portion of a second it was pointed right at the president's head.The unlikelihood of that happening is close to 100%. First of all, the agent would most likely have not had his finger on the trigger while he was holding the rifle up and looking around to see if he could spot a shooter. If he fell back and lowered the rifle, there would have been less than a second when it really was pointed toward the president at all.More significantly, IF this had all happened, there is no way in the world none of the other 9 people aboard (including agents on the running boards) that vehicle would not have reported hearing a gunshot from a couple of feet away. Certainly some of the hundreds in Dealey Plaza would have reported seeing and/or hearing a gunshot from the area of the car behind the president. Someone with a still camera would surely have photographed something to support this film's preposterous claim. The only photo showing him with a rifle was taken after leaving the scene of the shooting-which is when the agent says he picked up the rifle in the first place.The film makes a big deal about the autopsy claiming the entry wound on the final shot was reported as 6 millimeters, when the bullets from Oswald's gun were 6.5 mm. It never mentions that skin can contract after a hole is poked. It doesn't mention that the hole in JFK's neck wound--the one they agree came from Oswald's rifle--was measured as 4 mm. So much for that notion.They never mention that ballistic tests on actual human skulls found bullets of the type Oswald used often did shatter on impact and explode like the final bullet in the JFK shooting. Instead, they waste time shooting bullets into melons to demonstrate how some bullets will explode on impact more easily than others.Presenting only evidence that advances your claims and excluding facts known that contradict those claims is dishonest.The best part of this film is when they show how the shot that hit both the president and Governor Connelly could definitely have done so, because of the fact that the governor's seat was more toward the middle of the car than the president's--that there was nothing magic about that bullet hitting both men...it did not change course in mid-air as the conspiracy people have claimed.That comes early in the film. I advise anyone to switch channels after that portion and not waste their time (like I did) with the rest of this nonsense.
Michael Wehle This film was not worth an hour and a half of my time. There's about 20 minutes of material stretched with endless repetition and reenactments so it'll be suitable for broadcast with commercial interruptions every ten minutes. The constant recitation of what was just said a few minutes before gave me vertigo. If you *must* watch this movie you may want to do so in five or ten minute stretches.Howard Donahue's thesis is an interesting one, I think Donahue did solid work in researching it and Menninger lays it out well in Mortal Error. The Smoking Gun, however, fails to adequately explain Colin McLaren's presence, and what if anything he added to Donahue and Menninger's work.
gavin6942 After fifty years of the JFK assassination remaining officially solved but still debatable, how do you get new information? Apparently by bringing in a detective from Australia.Now, exactly how looking at the scene fifty years later tells you much about what happened in 1963 with all the changes that must have occurred is beyond me. And then, at this point, almost all evidence is second-hand and based on photos and whatnot. But there are inconsistencies to analyze.Indeed, the Warren Report made conclusions that contradict what a Secret Service agent reported. Is this unusual? Maybe, maybe not. In my time reading police and FBI reports, I know it is not unusual for witnesses to be mistaken. So is it likely that the agent was wrong and the report right, or the agent right and the report wrong? (This actually seems to be beside the point, since the film tends to support the single bullet theory an merely argues the order of shots was wrong -- this makes no difference.) Granted, I am not expert on the assassination, beyond the involvement of the Mafia (which was minimal), so it is hard for me to properly assess the theory put forward here.