Into the Abyss (2011)

Review

Werner Herzog cannot resist getting too meddled-in in this look at capital punishment, reducing the documentarian value of a story with good potential about two young men sentenced to death and life in prison, respectively, for a triple homicide in Texas in 2001. Herzog interviews (and interviews) the convicted, the bereaved, police officials, and various friends and family, but his cutting room work lets him down, and the film turns out too talkative and with a hint of condescension on account of Herzog's intellectual point of view, which often makes the distance between him and his subject into the film's real abyss.