Rating: NR | Runtime: 104 minutes
Release Date: September 1st, 2022 (Australia) / February 7th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Pivot Pictures / Vantage Media
Director(s): Scott Major
Writer(s): Christopher Gist

I’m going to push this thing to its limits.

It’s not easy to objectively look at a movie centered around a school shooting when you live in a country that endures one almost every month. This is especially true when confronted with one hailing from Australia like director Scott Major and writer Christopher Gist’s Line of Fire (previously Darklands). It’s been almost twenty-seven years since a lone gunman killed thirty-five people there, ushering in some of the world’s toughest gun laws.

To therefore present this mass killing in such a way that makes it seem as commonplace an occurrence as it is in the US forces you to pause straight away. It proves the fictitious death of twenty children is merely a plot device—not to comment on gun violence or mental health, but to exploitatively pit a cop against a journalist for thrills that come at a much higher cost here.

Because you can’t just create this narrative without context or political ambitions. While it might be able to exist as a twisty thriller about a grieving mother violently teaching another woman that her pain isn’t for sale in Australia, its choices hold a lot more baggage in America. Here it’s cop (Nadine Garner’s Samantha Romans) versus media (Samantha Tolj’s Jamie Connard).

It doesn’t matter that the former’s “good guy with a gun” failed to stop the shooting despite being on the grounds as it started. It doesn’t matter that the latter is a sensationalist blogger looking for clicks rather than the truth. All many people will see is a woman in blue coming from a troubled past justifiably dragging an affluent “member of the lying elite” through the trenches of true suffering.

Is that fair to the film? Perhaps not. But it’s a reality that must be reckoned with when it gets sold overseas to a country drenched in the blood of rising partisan politics and violence. So, while effectively drawn characters serving their specific purpose in this genre work, Samantha and Jamie also become stand-ins for two sides of a much more complicated reality.

It therefore begins feeling like copaganda when the the story takes pains to show how far Samantha has been pushed into the darkness. And it feels bloodthirsty to root for Jamie’s torture even if her actions demand some form of education. Not only is she an ambulance chaser, but she refuses to do even a minimal background check on the target of her overzealous and libelous pursuit. She’s not a “real” journalist, but Major and company aren’t dealing with the nuance of that fact. The alt-right thinks actual journalistic truth is libelous too.

I can’t personally separate its entertainment from its messaging—unwitting or not. I just can’t. All the power to you if you can, though, because Line of Fire is entertaining. When Jamie dares to “report” that Samantha was a coward for not confronting the shooter, I could feel the latter’s rage. This is someone who’s lived unspeakable trauma being judged by someone who’s never had to even conceive of what it means to face down death.

And if Samantha has already lost everything, what does she have to lose by manufacturing a scenario where Jamie can know for certain whether her talk or “doing anything for her family” is more than bluster? Gist weaves a captivating yarn with surprises that may or may not prove moot considering we know Jamie records her phone calls, but that’s me projecting nuance again. The moment you do that, the film falls apart.

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Nadine Garner and Samantha Tolj in LINE OF FIRE; courtesy of VMI Releasing.