KNOLL

May 15, 2017
The intriguingly offbeat idea that Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay for the 1973 film Executive Action was censored to hide the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination underpins this so-so conspiracy thriller from Hillard (The Lost Chronicles of Ara with Joel Eisenberg). In 2014, Texas Representative Gary Ochray of the House Intelligence Committee vows to use his powers to identify who was behind the assassination. Two years later, Colorado prosecutor Columbus “Bus” McIntyre learns that his father, a cop killed in the line of duty in 1970, may have been involved. Just after a scandal derails Bus’s bid to become DA, an old high school football buddy, now a police detective, hands him an old manila folder containing a journal kept by Bus’s late father. One entry reads: “For what I did in Dallas, they will find me.” There’s also a reference to mafioso Carlos Marcello, a name Bus recognizes from “the lineup of JFK assassination suspects.” In the next chapter, the two-decades-dead Marcello (or his ghost) talks with a former triggerman in a scene that does nothing to enhance the suspension of disbelief needed to engage with the less than compelling story line.