Directed by Ante Novakovic, ‘Sanctioning Evil’ is a new action thriller film that touches upon moral concerns related to its characters in positions of authority. Written by Kyle Travis Sharp from the story by Lance Sharp, the film makes an honest attempt to touch upon the nitty-gritty of the country’s inner workings in a grim manner. The film stars Tobias Truvillion, Chris Tardio, Zach McGowan, Taryn Manning, Carrie Kim, and Tasha Lawrence among other actors. With the character of a soldier at its center, it tries to encapsulate the nature of corporate America where the truth is not always what it seems at first glance.
Sanctioning Evil (2022) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
The film begins with a scene from the Faryab province in Afghanistan, a troop of the American army navigates the land around them. Cut to the present and we see Sergeant Reginald Barnes in front of a court of law. Back on the war ground, we see a white soldier under his command shoot an innocent civilian despite Sergeant’s repeated warnings not to do so. This reckless behavior under his command costs him his honorable post. He gets offered a chance by a politician named Dakota (Zach McGowan) to turn his life upside down and this crook tries to sell this opportunity by professing his love and care for the troops.
Flash forward 8 months later and we see Barnes struggling to make the ends meet while staying with his mother. He calls the office of Dakota after which this politician cancels all his appointments to meet him. In the meeting, he gets a chance for redemption by working against some people that have done questionable deeds. We also get a glimpse of his brother – Seth in an AA meeting earlier speaking with Dani (Taryn Manning). When he meets Seth, he gets a brief of the operation that he is supposed to work on, where he is required to kill the people mentioned by them. Later at night, he goes out on a drive with Seth where they get into an existential discussion of survival in circumstances such as theirs. He leaves Barnes at a bar where we see that he keeps getting flashbacks of the horrifying deaths in the warzone.
The next day, Barnes gets in a meeting with both Dakota and Seth where he gets a list of people along with their information to be killed. As a result, he starts sneaking up on them through casual interactions, not making them aware of his identity, initially, and later killing them ruthlessly. In between these merciless killings, we see him conversing with his mother where we learn about the death of his sister at a young age – the trauma which both he and his mother seem to not have gotten over due to not getting any closure. Meanwhile, at one of the killing spots, he gets shot by the next person after which he self-medicates.
Even after that Dakota and Seth try to convince him to go up the ladder in helping them while he also gets a pay increase. We see Barnes torturing a few other people who work in a child trafficking racket for sex work and trying to get information out of them about who they work for. He learns about Ambrose’s group which is handling people like one of them. While he keeps with his work for the politician, he keeps having nightmares about killing innocents. In a meeting describing his next target, he learns that he is supposed to kill an associate from his army troop. He can’t believe it right away due to their shared history in the army but goes on to work on the deed he is assigned to. He also gets another army man from his troop on board, who was trying to make the ends meet. Jeff (Chris Tardio) gets amazed seeing all the guns and arms they receive and afterward, joins him. At night, he kills a person after which the police find out about the killed person’s questionable deeds regarding minors.
Even after killing one of his troop members, Barnes is questioned for his methods by Dakota and Seth, which angers him. That makes the brothers question his allegiance and they decide to leave a tracker on him. Dakota is later questioned by FBI personnel that includes Dani about his contact with people from the army. His wife becomes suspicious of his activities because of it. Meanwhile, as a result of earlier discourse, Seth goes to Barnes’ house to make him feel valued. While Dakota is seen as a champion of the well-being of the troops, Barnes is brutally punched down by someone in authority. They are later visited by congressman Dakota, who shares the miscommunication between them.
As a result of this, Barnes learns that he was just a device for Dakota to use against the people who didn’t let him into the sex trafficking racket. Meanwhile, we also learn that Barnes’s motive was to seek vengeance for his sister’s kidnapping that led to her untimely death. He meets Virginia (Tasha Lawrence), Dakota’s silent partner, who shares a document pertaining to his sister’s death – connecting it with some more criminals. At the AA meeting, when Dani is having a word with Seth, Barnes pops up and takes him somewhere else.
Sanctioning Evil (2022) Movie Review: Intent can’t alone help this poorly written film
From a reputed army man to a nobody, Sergeant Barnes loses all his worth due to something that he didn’t do himself. He gets implicated in something due to being a person in command, which also gets an angle of black soldiers being pushed into such a bleak future despite the crimes being committed by irresponsible white soldiers. I’m not sure if this racial angle was something that the writers thought of while working on the script, but it is certainly an arc worth exploring. There is hardly any development done on this front while all Sanctioning Evil resorts to is a series of cliches.
These army people, being left completely helpless in the greed-serving economy of the country, reminded me a bit of the recent Aubrey Plaza film, ‘Emily, the Criminal’. Yet the nuanced exploration of Emily’s psyche is nowhere to be found in Sanctioning Evil, which just resorts to cringe dialogue writing that is largely derivative of the older films handling such subjects. The dialogues are occasionally so awful that you end up laughing at the film’s serious moments. ‘You know what’s in my pocket? YOU!’ Just to give you an example of the kind of writing you witness while watching the film.
The play of motives at the heart of the narratives, along with the subject of the loss of honor, dignity, and self-respect – is certainly admirable. Different characters, who worked for the army once and now choosing their different paths according to the options they receive is also an interesting angle within the script. However, that doesn’t help the film be any deeper since it showcases a surface-level understanding of these issues with lazy scene writing. The most obvious choices done in the script in almost every given situation make it lose the element of ‘thrill’ that it so badly tries to achieve.
The moral dilemma for Barnes among others and the reasons they give themselves as justifications for their action is what keeps you occasionally invested. There is certainly an honest attempt at play here that showcases the makers’ interest in exploring the internal conflicts of the characters with respect to the outside circumstances. The poor script development is what keeps Sanctioning Evil from feeling the thrust of its stakes.
Sanctioning Evil (2022) Ending, Explained:
Is a better future waiting for Barnes?
Dani follows Seth and Barnes and ends up at a place of a shootout. Both raid the secret spot of the pervert criminals and start killing them along with Jeff. Meanwhile, Dani tries to record their interaction to gain more evidence about their connection. Barnes confronts these criminals for killing his sister when they try to bribe him. He doesn’t want money but revenge, which becomes clear by this point in time. After their killing, we see Dakota receiving an envelope with ‘Ambrose’ written on it, with a photo of his daughter inside. He gets a call from Virginia who invites him to meet. He gets Seth and Barnes to join him.
Over there, Virginia mentions how she helped Dakota rise the ladders in congress from being an ordinary clerk to a reputed politician. She reveals Dani being her niece who shared the recording of Seth from the previous fight implicating Dakota’s relation to it. With this leverage, she becomes confident to order them to work for her. In the end, they get out of this place working under the authority of one person to another and ending up in the cycle of bureaucracy while sinking deeper into it.
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SANCTIONING EVIL (2022) TRAILER
SANCTIONING EVIL (2022) LINKS: IMDB, ROTTEN TOMATOES
SANCTIONING EVIL (2022) CAST: TOBIAS TRUVILLIAN, ZACH MCGOWAN, TARYN MANNING, CHRIS TARDIO, TASHA LAWRENCE
