SOVEREIGN is a very solemn and creepy true crime movie about a doomed father and son. We know from the opening flash-forward (with what sure sounds like real 911 recordings) that they will be involved in a shootout with police. A traffic stop gone wrong, small time end-of-the-road shit, nothing spectacular, but just as final as if it was.
Most of the movie is not exactly about crime, it’s just about their lives shortly before that fateful conflict. Joe Kane (Jacob Tremblay, BEFORE I WAKE, THE TOXIC AVENGER) is a quiet, gawky teenager who doesn’t go to school. He tells police he’s home schooled, and it’s basically true; he follows a lesson plan and everything, but usually there’s no teacher. His dad Jerry (Nick Offerman, THE KINGS OF SUMMER) is away on business most of the time, putting on small seminars about debt elimination and forestalling foreclosures. He’s an expert, I guess, because they’re threatening to take his house away but he refuses to accept any communications about it and spews all kinds of arcane (what he considers) facts about why they can’t do that. (read the rest of this shit…)
