Film Review: Parkland

Undated Film Still Handout from Parkland. Pictured: Billy Bob Thornton. See PA Feature FILM Film Reviews Picture credit should read: PA Photo/ Exclusive Media Entertainment. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature FILM Film Reviews.

When man landed on the moon and Martin Luther King Jr delivered his defiant “I have a dream” speech; when Israel mourned its murdered athletes at the Munich Olympic Games and the Watergate scandal claimed the presidency of Richard Nixon; when catastrophe struck the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and east met west at the fall of the Berlin Wall; when Nelson Mandela emerged a free man and tears flowed for Princess Diana; when United Airline Flight 175 impacted the south tower of the World Trade Center.

Some pages in history leave an indelible mark.

On November 22, 1963, America recoiled at news that President John F Kennedy had been fatally shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas.

Writer-director Peter Landesman dramatises events before, during and after the fateful motorcade, through the eyes of men and women whose paths intersected with the Kennedys that autumn day.

There are some remarkable images here such as the Secret Service struggling to carry Kennedy’s coffin aboard Air Force One, but there is also a frustrating dearth of gut-wrenching emotion on the screen that might have knitted together the myriad plot strands.