If you’re expecting a twisty and thrilling look at a dangerous group of hackers who hide deep within a military bunker in Europe, and who refer to their entire operation as “straight from a James Bond movie,” then you might be disappointed with Cyberbunker, a dragging documentary that relies too heavily on talking heads for momentum. It takes 30 minutes to establish the relevance of these figures, and a full hour before it finally explains the actual crime and wrongdoings they’re complicit in. The most interesting parts of the case, like the FBI’s involvement, Cyberbunker’s links to the propagation of child pornography, and the group’s advocacy on internet privacy, are completely buried beneath a stack of unnecessary tidbits. I appreciate the effort of the filmmakers and the interviewees coming together to make something decently informative, but by the end of it, you’re left wondering whether all this was better off as a Wikipedia article.

Despite being the founder of Cyberbunker, Herman-Johan Xennt is almost nowhere to be found. There is a brief interview with him teased in the beginning and re-used by the end of the film, understandably because he remains detained in prison, but I can’t help but wonder whether people closer to him could’ve drawn a more descriptive picture of the brains behind the operation. The involvement of colleague Sven Olaf Kamphuis, present in the documentary, seems more pronounced and at times more interesting, but the constant shift in focus makes the documentary seem more confused than it already is.