The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot (2019) - Movie Review

I love movies like this. Well, to be more accurate, I love movie titles like this. The ones that are direct and to the point about what they’re about, or that are so outright bizarre that they stick in the mind regardless of the film’s actual content, or the rare instance of both at the same time. However, the title itself is accurate in terms of content, its tone is another story. Whatever you think this movie is going to be like, you’re probably on the wrong track.

This isn’t a B-movie. This isn’t a comedy. This isn’t even a comedy in the Z-A-Z style where how seriously everyone is treating the material is part of the joke. In the words of Sam Elliott’s Calvin, the titular Man, “this is nothing like the comic book you want it to be.”

Instead, it’s a relatively low-key and sombre adventure drama, one that basically deconstructs the mythic tone of its own title. As we follow Calvin, both in his Elliott-visaged present and in flashbacks where he is played by Aidan Turner, we see someone who has evidently lived an interesting life, but there’s a lot about it that he’d rather forget. And yes, that includes the first half of the title.

Now, that’s not to say that he regrets doing it; this isn’t that kind of movie. Rather, it’s that while he certainly put some slugs in one of humanity’s greatest mistakes, that wasn’t enough to stop Hitler’s own mythos. The image, the ideals, the skull-crushing movement he birthed; all of that survived the attack. The flesh is easy to destroy, but the ideas that fill in the blanks are much trickier. He may have been the one to kill Hitler… but after what followed, he doesn’t think he did anything of worth.

Images of the past keep picking away at Calvin’s brain, like a stone in his shoe that he can’t get rid of. And for as bombastic as the specifics get, like how the Bigfoot is the carrier of a plague that could wipe out the entire world, and for as tonally off-kilter as it appears, like an early scene where Calvin gets a shave, it manages to keep a seemingly-impossible balance between presenting all of these larger-than-life events, and keeping the flesh-and-blood people involved in them right in the crosshairs.

That’s something that tends to get lost when we treat history the same way producers and marketers treat high-concept movies. ‘The man who did this’, ‘The woman who did that’, ‘The people who did this’; while it’s true that a person’s actions end up outliving the mortal frame that actually did them, when we remember people purely on those terms, it ends up burning away the personality, the mentality, the raw humanity of those same people. We may be doing so out of a feeling of respect, but there’s no guarantee that the person will take it that way. And yes, I am still talking about someone who killed Hitler.

It’s a definite left-hook of a film, but a left-hook with true intent behind it. It looks at the notion of man-made myth, one where man is directly at the center of it, and pretty much dissolves the grandiosity that gets attributed to it. Where The Kid Who Would Be King reinvented myth to reflect a new generation, this film dismantles myth entirely. It takes someone who killed two of history’s most infamous creatures, and highlights how because the ideas behind them are still alive and kicking (admittedly, the conspiracies surrounding the latter are far more benign than the fascist ideology behind the former), there’s no glory to be found in either event.