Review of Machiavelli Hangman
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Imagine Quentin Tarantino making a new version of Billy Wilder’s 
Double Indemnity starring Charlie Chaplin. If you imagine it 
correctly, then you have on your hands the exceptionally funny 
and impressive Machiavelli Hangman. There are so many ways of 
describing this brilliantly unconventional undertaking written 
and directed by the talented Shervin Youssefian that I 
would feel awfully bad giving it a conventional review. 

So I will tell you not what the film is or did or stands for, but 
everything that it’s not. If you have seen some of the other 
films that came out this year, you would know that there hasn’t 
really been anything exceptional to hit the theatres lately. Of 
course, we’d like to think that there has been and we haven’t 
really wasted our hard-earned money on material that wasn’t worth 
it. Sure Steven Spielberg’s War of the World gave a good 
performance by Tom Cruise but the ending was ridiculously 
infantile. Crash was the epitome of what good filmmaking should 
be but it still lacked that ounce of originality that would have 
set it aside from those other films. Batman Begins was just ok.

Machiavelli Hangman doesn’t repeat itself or hammer all the hints 
and clues into the audience’s brain until it feels like the 
filmmakers are taking us for complete nimrods. It doesn’t leave 
you open-mouthed at how many curse words can fit in the same line 
of dialogue. It doesn’t stretch a scene for so long, you realize 
they had to make a late cut to reach the 2hour limit. It doesn’t 
portray characters so wooden that they don’t leave the immediate 
silver screen.

What Machiavelli Hangman is however is a combination of those 
great films that have engrained themselves into your psyche as if 
a meteor had hit the surface of your brain. Remember how you felt 
the first time you watched the shark jump out of the water in 
Jaws? Or when you watched the US invasion of the coast of 
Normandy in Saving Private Ryan? Or perhaps Indiana Jones running 
out of the cave with the giant boulder about to crush him? Ok, so 
these are all Steven Spielberg films but even he hasn’t delivered 
anything decent in the past decade. This film reinstates my fate 
in American cinema by reminding me why I go to the theatre time 
after time. It’s to feel the reality in those characters and 
completely lose myself in the film and not be aware that I have 
been staring at a rectangular screen for two hours.

This film is grandiose in its intimate context. It brings to the 
surface the most beautiful and cruel human characteristics to the 
surface and makes you look inward and reevaluate your own 
relevance to the larger scheme of things. 

Stewart Benypayo is a movie reviewer.
Machiavelli Hangman
http://www.hangmanmovie.com