5/5 stars

First time director Shervin Youssefian has called Pulp 
Fiction his biggest influence and Machiavelli Hangman, an 
exhilarating comic drama about a man who is mistaken for a 
gangster is comparable to the best of Quentin Tarantino’s 
earlier films.

It is a darkly funny, stylish and realistic look at the 
underworld of criminals and how human fear can present itself 
in so many other disguises including nervousness, sarcasm and 
courage. The cast is superbly put together from the smallest of 
characters to the two leading performers. Machiavelli Hangman
is a social club where individuals with great minds and attitudes
come to battle out their wits. The beauty of the film, however, 
extends beyond the characters’ charm and appeal. It is how 
ingeniously the filmmaker has created the narrative structure. 

Imagine a whole film cutting back and forth between two time 
frames. This may have been done in the English Patient when we 
cut back and forth between the early nineteen hundreds and then 
thirty years later. What is so different and exciting about 
Machiavelli Hangman is that there are no thirty years that 
separate the two timeframes. It’s a matter of hours between 
Monday and  Tuesday, cutting back and forth ferociously, every 
time with a fresh look on the same scene that we had just 
witnessed.

The film is an incredible mix of a few different films including 
Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Usual Suspects, Sexy Beast, 
Godfather and Memento. The broken structure narrative is a close 
relative as the previously listed films but "Hangman" still 
somehow manages to breathe new life into the genre. 

There is also an amazing reference to the John F. Kennedy 
assassination that left me open-mouthed for a whole hour after I 
saw the film. I had heard rumors that the government didn’t want 
this film to be released and after I watched, I understand 
precisely why. Without giving too much away, the film explains 
how Lee Harvey Oswald was never the man who pulled the trigger 
and there was another man behind the president’s assassination. 
This wasn’t the biggest surprise to me until I realized who that 
person was.

Comedic at times and dramatic at others, Machiavelli Hangman is 
going to be a powerful political tool for the American public. It 
will open a lot of eyes as to how our government works, sometimes 
against us by hiding extremely relevant information from us. In 
fact, the JFK file and all the documentation were going to be 
held secret until the year 2025.

Thankfully, we don’t have to wait that long. Now we can simply go 
to the movies because our filmmakers have come through for us, 
yet again with this cinematic gem. 

Frank Perkins is a movie reviewer.
Machiavelli Hangman
http://www.hangmanmovie.com