Movie Review: Risk

"Presently the film is a severe threat to my freedom and I am forced to treat it accordingly.”

Yikes. Julian Assange’s review of Laura Poitras’ documentary Risk is damning. Though, in fairness, I felt the same way about Transformers: The Last Knight when I heard it would be three hours long.

Assange probably has more reason to be annoyed. Risk, centered on Assange’s stewardship of WikiLeaks from 2011 to today (mostly at the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he remains holed up), does not exactly depict the Australian hacker as a righteous ‘Robin Hood’ of government secrets.

Instead, we see him buy into his cult of personality. We watch him invite ‘Bond villain’ comparisons by donning a disguise to taste freedom on his motorcycle. We listen in as he calls Hillary Clinton with news of an impending leak, reminding her people with some menace, “We don’t have a problem, you have a problem.”

Most concerningly, we hear him write off the rape allegations levelled against him as a conspiracy, later joking that the assault claims have made him a “household name”—and that he should be part of one every six months—all on camera. (Sweden’s investigation into those allegations were dropped in May of this year. Nonetheless, British police want him for skipping bail in 2012.)

Is it still a hatchet job if you’re the one wielding the hatchet?

Poitras—who offers sleepy, first-person narration throughout the picture—expresses her surprise over Assange’s willingness to let her steal these private moments. She also admits the two of them argued multiple times over the filming of the doco, and that she allowed him to see an early cut (after which he offered the above review). For full disclosure, she even confesses that, during production, she was involved with Jacob Appelbaum, a privacy activist and one-time WikiLeaks spokesperson who appears prominently, and who was accused of sexual misconduct in late 2016.

It’s not only Assange’s reputation that suffers when the credits roll.

Risk

The murky ethics behind the making of Risk fit the murkier ethics of its subject, meaning this is one of those “accidentally good” movies that is a trainwreck for all involved, but might still be worth watching.

The film was re-edited after its Cannes 2016 debut, to add Assange’s involvement in the U.S. presidential election (WikiLeaks published the emails at the center of all those Russian hacking claims). Frustratingly for Poitras, history keeps on happening, rendering Risk increasingly dated by the minute. It’s ironic that Assange circumvented old media to unleash hell with WikiLeaks, and now he’s being shoehorned back into a less-agile medium.

This last-minute reshaping contributes to the shakiness of the structure. A chapter-by-chapter outline was apparently jettisoned in favour of this new, rambling, fly-on-the-wall style, closer to her last picture, the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. That flick, however, gradually tightened the vice as Edward Snowden prepared to leak surveillance information from a Hong Kong hotel room. It was thrillingly claustrophobic. Risk is less a political thriller so much as it’s an episode of Cribs: Ecuadorian Embassy Edition. Not even a visit from Lady Gaga—conducting a vapid, ego-stroking interview of Assange, who aloofly indulges her questions like a blonde Father John Misty—can bring it to life.

Some consider Assange’s WikiLeaks an essential outlet for information integral to the public interest. Others consider it an enemy of the state. Donald Trump’s administration has suggested it’s both, at different times. This doco doesn't clarify the matter, despite Poitras offering Assange a final monologue, in which he compares the world to his back garden, adding that he simply wants to make it better.

“Perhaps I have a God complex,” he concedes.

In Citizenfour, you might reach the conclusion that Snowden, for all his self-righteousness, at least seemed to be operating by a code; a stubborn sense of right and wrong.

Assange, under the camera’s glare in Risk, can’t convince viewers of the same. His motives, despite his posturing, remain muddy. This might mark the movie’s only achievement. It is impervious to hubris. Just, accidentally so.

2.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated M for coarse language.