Alex Gibney is the documentary filmmaker whose politically charged exposés include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. It makes sense that he would clamber onto the spicy tale of Julian Assange, the white-haired super-hacker whose WikiLeaks enterprise has brought down the wrath of governments and corporations. Gibney should be a good match with the subject. But We Steal Secrets, while containing no shortage of fascinating material, is less than satisfying.
Gibney begins with background on Assange and WikiLeaks, building to the 2010 disclosure of a video of the U.S. military killing people revealed to be non-combatants in Baghdad. That was followed by the cascade of classified documents leaked by Assange and simultaneously published in The New York Times.