It's conspiracies week at Bad Dads. All four dads — Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris — count down the Top Five Conspiracies before getting to Sovereign (2025), a devastating drama about a father and son in the Sovereign Citizen movement that made $63,000 at the box office and absolutely deserved better.
In the Top Five:
- JFK — Oliver Stone's four-hour masterpiece of the grassy knoll, covered in full
- All the President's Men — Woodward, Bernstein, the paper that's now owned by Bezos
- Michael Clayton — Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson going off his meds
- V for Vendetta — the graphic novel Alan Moore hated adapted by people he also hated
- The Matrix/Moon Landing — Kubrick and the simulation, one or two topics
- Zoolander — the fashion industry behind every political assassination for 200 years
- Bubba Ho-Tep — Elvis, Black JFK, Egyptian mummy. Cris's nom. Correct.
- Elvis vs Nixon — the real meeting, the badges, the conspiracy of what they said to each other
- COINTELPRO — the real FBI programme that makes the conspiracy theories look tame
- Sidey's friend's COVID/QAnon texts — read in full, genuinely extraordinary
Reegs' Conspiracy Quiz:
Real or made up? Finland, Denver Airport, Victorian tax avoidance, Tuskegee, government surveillance birds, and Wetherspoons underground tunnels.
On Sovereign:
- Nick Offerman in an unexpected dramatic turn — really big and violent
- Jacob Tremblay as Joe, the son, in what both Reegs and Dan consider career-best work
- The Sovereign Citizen movement explained, and the real incident it's based on
- Dennis Quaid as the sheriff whose son is killed
- Martha Plimpton's brief appearance as a seminar devotee
- Why Joe shoots the police: not madness, but inevitability
- The baby at the end. You'll understand when you get there.
Verdict: Strong recommend all round. Heavy. Almost nobody saw it. One of those films.
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