YMMV / The Assassination of Richard Nixon

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Late in the film, Sam approaches Jack in a restaurant and nearly shoots him dead, but is unable to do so. Opinions vary on whether he did this because he just lost his nerve, whether it was a bit of Pragmatic Villainy on realising that if he shot Jack in such a public place then he'd get arrested long before he could put his plan to assassinate Nixon into action, or whether he decided that for all his misdeeds, Jack hadn't done anything to actually deserve being killed.
  • In the scene where he break's into his ex-wife's house, Sam shoots the family dog in the basement. Would he have also murdered his ex-wife and children had they been home?
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • While one could buy that Bonny, Jack and Marie had grown so sick and tired of Sam that they genuinely don't give two shits about hearing that he got himself shot dead while trying to hijack a plane, Marie seems awfully calm considering that she'd almost certainly have found out that her pet dog had been murdered by her ex-husband by that point.
  • While Sam's family, former co-workers, and friends were understandably ready to wash their hands of him personally, it's difficult to believe that they wouldn't take an interest in somebody they know being behind a terrorist plot at an airport.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: One of the reasons for this film's relatively limited release and poor box office performance was its close proximity (in 2004) to the 9/11 attacks, which were too fresh and traumatic in many people's minds to want to watch a movie about a domestic terrorist who tries to fly a plane into the White House.
• Expy: Although he's based on the real-life Sam Byck, many of Sam's personality traits and his awkward personal and professional interactions resemble those of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy in various scenes. His downward spiral and violent breakdown resemble Bickle's, his delusional ambitions and tendency to badger and stalk people who want nothing to do with him or his crazy ideas resemble Pupkin's behavior.
• Jerkass Woobie: Sam is a cowardly, hypocritical, irresponsible and angry person who blames people for his mistakes and makes life harder for almost everyone he meets. But he's been so beaten down by life and his problems and struggling so hard to keep himself together for so long it's hard not to feel bad for him.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Sam's repeatedly shouting "IT'S ABOUT MONEY, DICK!" in the middle of the furniture store after he announces his intention to quit is the first sign that he's seriously starting to lose it, with the way that he repeats his Madness Mantra in an ever louder and more abusive tone becoming more than a little unnerving. For that matter, the blissful Slasher Smile that's left on his face after Jack tells him to shut up, implying that this is the earliest moment that his plan to kill Nixon began to form, even if he still expected to get his loan at this stage.
  • The film's climax, as we see someone who for the most part has been presented as an eccentric but mostly harmless loner descend into homicidal lunacy. Even though his shooting spree is the result of his initial plan falling apart before he can even get on-board the plane, we see him graphically gun down at least two people and badly injure several more, before he gets messily filled with bullets by a police officer and finally Driven to Suicide.
  • The fact that if Sam — and, for that matter, the real Samuel Byck — had managed to get on-board the plane without his gun being found and successfully take control of the plane once it was in the air, his plan would have had a not-insignificant chance of succeeding. The main obstacle would have been the fact that he had no training on how to fly a plane, meaning that he'd probably have stalled and crashed it. But if he had been able to pilot it successfully, the air defense protocols in Washington, D.C. at the time wouldn't realistically have been able to stop him, and there's little guarantee Nixon would have been evacuated from the White House in time. In other words, Bicke/Byck could have caused 9/11 27 years early.
• One-Scene Wonder: Michael Wincott gives a poignant, much-praised performance as Sam's brother Julius, who basically disowns Sam after the tire theft.
• Spiritual Successor: The film is essentially Taxi Driver for a new generation.
• Tear Jerker:
  • An ambitious man with a loving family sees his wife and children disown him, his dreams fall apart and can't escape the feeling that he is being thread upon by an uncaring Government that's so wretched with corruption that it needs to be taken down completely. Even sadder is that it's based on a true story and Sam definitely isn't the only person to feel like this.
  • The scene where Julius disowns Sam after the tire theft is very sad. As Julius holds back tears, you can tell that he truly cared for and accepted his emotionally unstable brother, warts and all, and put up with his strange, erratic behavior for years because of family loyalty, until the theft became a last straw that finally broke the camel's back.

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