Until now? With this queasy mix of documentary and fiction from director T.J. Regan, the film’s opening sequence climaxes, so to speak, with footage set in the present day in which one Rodney Lewis Bonnifield asserts, “I am D.B. Cooper.”
Bonnifield is an old white guy, overweight and unshaven. Wow, what are the odds that D.B. Cooper would turn out to be such a person, right? Anyway, the documentary portion of the movie focuses on real-life bail bondsmen Carlos Rocha and Mike Rocha, the movie’s executive producers, and how their fulfillment of a warrant for Bonnifield yielded the fantastic story Regan and company recreate in fictional mode.
“The people got a right to know what I am and who I am,” Bonnifield asserts. Mostly, he comes off as the very guy the Rochas caught up with: a dumb slob who got into a knife fight. But the tale Bonnifield weaves includes sweeping adventures in criminality, as well as an on-the-road affair with singer Rita Coolidge. The filmmakers include an “interview” with a young, fictionalized Coolidge, played by Rainee Blake. As well as a fake interview with Bonnifield’s parents, also played by actors, which is structured like a bad comedy routine. “He was a little entrepreneur,” Fake Mom says. “He was a little bastard,” counters Fake Dad.
All this is tiresome enough on its own. (And Ryan Cory’s performance as the criminal, styling young 1970s Bonnifield as a thoroughly 21st century, well, dickhead, compounds the tedium.) But wait, there’s more: It’s interwoven with an equally tiresome account of the Rochas looking for D.B. Cooper’s loot—Bonnifield has provided them with instructions on where to find it. Spoiler alert: if you caught the Geraldo Rivera “Al Capone’s Vault” live television event, you know how this is going to turn out.