Critic Reviews

Imperium is a well-spun, tight thriller, thanks in no small part to Radcliffe’s excellent, sharply focused performance.

A chilling, surprisingly effective crime thriller.

Nate’s journey is used primarily to show us the variations in extremist groups and how they might accomplish something drastic like set off a dirty bomb; his inner turmoil takes a back seat. The movie works just fine as a straightforward thriller, though.

It demonstrates both the fatal proximity and deceptive distance that can exist between the words and deeds of extremists.

Radcliffe’s performance also ramps up toward the end of the movie, when the pressures of undercover life and his struggle to empathize with these people — his main asset as an undercover agent — really begin to weigh on him.

The most interesting character in Imperium is not even Nate. It’s Gerry Conway (Sam Trammell), a seemingly normal family man who reads the great philosophers and loves the music of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, even making an exception for the recordings of Jewish maestro Leonard Bernstein. Terrorists come in all flavors.

Subtlety is not Imperium’s strength. But as a solid thriller, it’s far more successful, and Radcliffe is brilliant as the quick-on-his-feet agent.

Imperium, at its best, is a film about the ideological crisis of seeing the principles your worldview is built upon repurposed for hate and bigotry. But once it reaches these highs, the third act mostly squanders them.

Imperium traffics in familiar undercover cop thriller conventions while gaining resonance from its disturbing, timely milieu.

Imperium’s depiction of the white-nationalist underground is ultimately background for a straightforward potboiler, and the film is at its best when it stays in that arena.