Blue Caprice (The Washington Snipers)

A lyric from Bob Marley's Natural Mystic "Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don't ask me why." This could easily be the tagline for a film that was inspired by real life events known as the Beltway sniper attacks, which resulted in the random killing of seventeen people with ten others suffering serious injury from gunshot wounds all carried out with no apparent motive.  The 2013 film Blue Caprice, also known as The Washington Snipers, is based on these attacks, but focuses heavily on the father-son relationship between John Muhammad  (Isaiah Washington) and Lee Malvo  (Tequan Richmond in his first starring role), quite a subject for Director Alexandre Moors to tackle in this his first full-length feature film?

 

The victim.

The perpetrator.

When the teenage Lee is abandoned by his mother in Antigua he does some odd jobs for John who is on holiday there with his estranged children. John brings the young man back to America and Lee starts to accept this man as a surrogate father.  When the pair gets back to the states they begin a reign of terror in the Washington DC metropolitan area by randomly shooting complete strangers in public places.  To this end they convert a blue Chevrolet Caprice by cutting a small hole just above the rear number plate and making the rear seating easily removable so that Malvo can lie in the back of the car unseen and with the aid of a high powered stolen Bushmaster XM-15 rifle ‘shoot to kill’ random victims. 

The Blue Chevrolet Caprice.

The distorted father son bond is very well portrayed by our two main actors, making this psychological thriller authentically plausible without explaining the real motive behind these terrible events which I believe was never really explained at either of the men’s trials.  Harrowing, slow and deliberate we see the killings from the perpetrators perspective. My only wee criticism’s are that the film did not delve into the psyche of the men and that the dialogue was at times unclear. On this straight to UK video release (June 2014) their were no under titles available or extras.