‘A Mighty Heart’ Gives A Free Pass to Terror
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
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America’s movie industry is a potent weapon of global reach that has shaped the world’s imagination for generations. In that sense, “A Mighty Heart,” the movie that pretends to tell the story of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and beheaded in 2002 by Islamic jihadists in Pakistan, ranks as a travesty.
Pearl’s story is a real-life yarn of multiple dimensions that, at its most grandiose, could have been spun as the tale of a great clash, a sort of collision between Nazi-like value systems and basic American ones — in the story of a working journalist on the chaotic streets of Pakistan.
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