Working-class Philadelphian Tom (William Baldwin) has caught a number of tough breaks since he left the army. But his beautiful, doting wife Susan (Kelly Lynch) stood with him through all of it. The result of their union is a beautiful daughter. The result of Tom's lack of education and career choices however is a rundown apartment and a pile of unpaid bills. Tom can't even hold down a job pushing a mop.
Seeing himself as hardworking and patriotic he comes to view his predicament as symptomatic of an elaborate conspiracy new friends tell him about. They are members of a highly dangerous neo-Nazi group led by charismatic and driven Bob Mathews (Peter Gallagher) - a psychotic conspiracy theorist and religious zealot with a sinister agenda and a group of devoted followers holing up in a compound in the Pacific Northwest to help him carry it out.
Mathews has extrapolated from fiction (The Turner Diaries) and fringe fundamentalist religious teachings a plan of action to violently undermine a federal government which he believes to be controlled by forces he considers malevolent.
Tom - a simpleton of jaw-dropping naiveté is drawn in hook, line and sinker but becomes uncomfortable when the activities of the group surpass the boundaries of legality veering off into counterfeiting, armed robbery, terrorist bombings and murder.
Based rather closely on a true story this production fails by focusing the majority of screen time on its weakest aspects - Tom Martinez's arc within the movement and William Baldwin's awful characterization playing him.
The plot should have centred around the Bob Mathews character and Peter Gallagher's performance as the driving force behind this frightening movement and it's most infamous act which was the murder of talk radio show shock jock Alan Berg.
Rob Labelle and Stephen E.Miller are American-born actors who found a niche in Canada's film industry often getting work by playing American characters in productions set in the United States but shot north of the border.
