Directed by Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion. PG. 84 min. Opens July 20.
There is a lot of reconciliatory rhetoric in The Redemption of General Butt Naked. But is there any truth? Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion’s documentary considers the question of whether a person who has confessed to taking at least 20,000 lives deserves the chance to reboot his own. Its subject, Joshua Milton Blahyi, is an evangelist trying to live down his previous incarnation as an Uzi-toting attack dog for the Liberian warlord Roosevelt Johnson during the country’s civil war.
As the film opens, Blahyi has been born again: A man who brainwashed child soldiers into committing mass murder and once actually claimed to be on a first-name basis with Satan is now flogging the Good Book. Is his barnstorming tour of his homeland an attempt to atone for past sins, or a gloating return to the scene of the crime? Strauss and Anastasion keep their opinions to themselves, letting the camera run while Blahyi spins gruesome tales of his past exploits and tries to convince his chroniclers that it’s his intimate involvement in Liberia’s brutal history that makes him an ideal facilitator of the healing process.
Such observations are, to say the least, unconvincing, and there are times where the man’s self-delusion would be hilarious if it wasn’t so chilling. Uncomfortable moments just keep piling up, like when Blahyi reaches out to a teenager whose parents were among his victims. And yet as a documentary subject, he’s magnetic. He exerts the same hold on the camera that he does on his newest crop of followers. You can’t take your eyes off of him, even if it’s very hard to tell exactly what you’re looking at.
