Conspiracies & Sovereign

Reegs: Welcome to Bad Dads Film Review — the podcast that is to film criticism as a cup of polonium tea is to a business lunch. Put on your tinfoil hat and start following the birds back to their charging stations, because this week we're counting down the Top Five Conspiracies. A segment that features more unsupported conclusions than the entire output of GB News, and more things that don't add up than Dan's bar tab.

Our main feature is Sovereign (2025) — a solemn and devastating drama inspired by real events, in which Nick Offerman plays a father raising his son in the firm belief that the law doesn't apply to them. Which turns out to be one of those beliefs that remains almost completely unchallenged right up until the moment it gets them both killed.

Before we go off-grid entirely, the opinions on this podcast have not been approved by any government intelligence agency or shadowy global elite — though we do remain open to sponsorship opportunities. For everyone else, it's time to meet this week's men who almost certainly appear on at least one government watch list.

Starting with Dan. He's so old he remembers when the Illuminati were just four blokes in a shed with a dream and a triangle.

Next up, handsome Cris. A man so handsome he's either proof that the simulation has a premium tier, or evidence of a government prototype that escaped before they finished the personality.

Doing his own research in third place — the man who told me the key to getting a source to open up is knowing exactly where to apply pressure and for how long. It's Sidey.

And then there's me, Reegs.

Opening Chat & Conspiracies in General

Dan: I like a conspiracy theory. Do you?

Reegs: So do I. I've got a few in a quiz later on. Real ones or made up ones — you can pick.

Dan: Nice one. Sidey, any particular go-tos?

Reegs: The birds as drones one is really good.

Sidey: Well, we know someone. I won't name them. But someone did actually, genuinely believe some wild stuff. Not so much a theory as just... mental.

Cris: Flat earth for me. That is the standard of conspiracy theory absolute bollocks. These idiots have put so much time, effort, money into it — some have quit their jobs to prove the earth is flat — and it's such an obvious thing. I just find it funny more than anything.

Sidey: Shall we get into the top five then?

Dan: I've got a joke first. Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. You can't tell me that's just a coincidence.

Reegs: Oh my God.

Dan: And: conspiracy theorists who believe in flat bread. They're naan believers.

Cris: Wow.

Football Update — Jersey League

Dan: It is a conspiracy that we might be getting through this quickly because the football's on. Update?

Sidey: Not the best performance. We were joint top and needed to beat them to go clear — they'd played a game less. One-all. Equalizer from someone off the bench. Deadly Gomes.

Cris: You played well until the last five minutes. Could have lost it but managed to draw.

Dan: There's potentially an ineligible player situation for them.

Sidey: That's a conspiracy theory at this stage. Still fighting for it though.

Top Five Conspiracies

Dan: JFK. Oliver Stone, Kevin Costner. Goes on for four days and covers every conspiracy angle — the grassy knoll, second shooter, CIA involvement. Oswald was then killed by Jack Ruby before he could talk. It's a deeply layered conspiracy and it's Stone's most influential film. I think a little overindulgent, but he'd just come off The Doors and was in that anti-establishment groove.

Sidey: My dad always says he remembers exactly where he was when he heard. It was a big moment — American president getting assassinated.

Dan: And now it seems almost absurd that they had him in an open top car driving around everywhere.

Reegs: All the President's Men. We reviewed it for the pod and absolutely loved it. Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein bringing down the Republican Party — now owned by Bezos, completely gutted. What we loved was how it treats the grind of real investigative journalism — drilling into bookkeeping, debates about ethics, the tension of it. The kind of thing you hope is still happening somewhere.

Sidey: Michael Clayton. Clooney dog. Good film. Tilda Swinton. Tom Wilkinson going off his meds. A corporate conspiracy about chemicals causing deformities — a bit like Erin Brockovich in that way. Clooney's never quite made partner level but he's a good fixer. Steady-paced, proper acting, well directed. I always think about nominating it.

Cris: V for Vendetta. A totalitarian government, a conspiracy where they poisoned a school, a man who survived a fire becomes V, finds Evie, and works his way through the system. The graphic novel is great. Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman. One scene where he speaks entirely in alliteration. John Hurt as the Big Brother figure. Alan Moore famously hated it, as he does all his adaptations.

Dan: The Matrix — we're living in a simulation. And while we're at it, the moon landing. There was that Scarlett Johansson film about faking it. Kubrick was supposedly approached to stage it after 2001. Then spent the rest of his career hiding references in his films — Danny's Apollo 11 jumper in The Shining. Though Sidey makes a good point: if you were going to pick any director to fake the moon landing, Kubrick is the one person who'd have demanded they actually go there for authenticity.

Reegs: And Buzz Aldrin still gets very pissy if you ask him about it.

Sidey: He'll throw hands.

Reegs' Conspiracy Quiz — Real or Made Up?

Reegs: Right, I'm going to read a conspiracy theory. You tell me if it's real — something actual people genuinely believe — or something I've invented in the last ten minutes.

Question one: Finland doesn't exist and never has.

Dan: Made up.

Sidey: Real.

Reegs: Real. According to believers, Finland is a fiction jointly invented by the Soviet Union and Japan in 1918, to allow Japanese fishing fleets to illegally trawl the Baltic Sea. What we call Finland is actually Eastern Sweden. The Finnish people are actors and Nokia is a front. This is a thing that people really believe.

Dan: I didn't know that.

Reegs: Question two: Denver Airport is the global headquarters of the New World Order.

Dan: I've been to Denver Airport and I can confirm that.

Reegs: If you've been there, you'll know there are genuinely disturbing apocalyptic murals, a blue horse with glowing red eyes that killed its own sculptor when it fell on him during construction, and Masonic symbols embedded throughout. Real conspiracy. People really believe it.

Question three: The Victorians invented children as a tax avoidance scheme.

Cris: True.

Reegs: False. I just made that one up.

Dan: I was going to say true.

Reegs: How about: the US government ran a secret program for decades in which they deliberately infected hundreds of Black men with syphilis without their knowledge or consent, then withheld treatment to study the progression of the disease.

Dan: Sadly true.

Sidey: I'd believe it.

Reegs: That is both a conspiracy theory and true. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, running from 1932 to 1972. Ended when a whistleblower leaked it. Clinton formally apologized in 1997.

Cris: Jesus.

Reegs: All birds in America are government surveillance drones.

Cris: I've actually had someone say this to me.

Reegs: Real — but deliberately invented. Peter McIndoe created it in 2017 as a satirical joke about conspiracy theories, and then it took on a life of its own. People actually believe it now. It's arguably the greatest ending to a story about conspiracy theories.

And finally: every Wetherspoons in Britain is connected by a network of underground tunnels built in the eighties for reasons nobody at the company will discuss.

Sidey: New one.

Reegs: Made up. But while we're on Wetherspoons — the game.

Sidey: If you post yourself on social media at a Spoons and say it's your birthday, someone will buy you a drink through the app.

Reegs: How has that algorithm found me?

Top Five Nominations

Dan: Elvis vs Nixon. Elvis collected badges his whole life and went to meet Nixon to ask for a DEA badge — a diplomatic credential that would let him pass through customs anywhere without issue because he was the King. Real meeting. Real request. The film explores the conspiracy of what they actually talked about.

Reegs: Zoolander. The fashion industry has been behind every major political assassination for two hundred years. John Wilkes Booth was the first actor-slash-model. JFK was killed because his Cuban trade embargo blocked the import of Biltslacks. Lincoln was killed because ending slavery made cotton more expensive. It all tracks. I believe it.

Cris: Bubba Ho-Tep. Elvis gyrated so hard he passed out and woke up in an asylum — where he teams up with JFK, who is now Black, to fight an Egyptian mummy. We loved this film on the pod. That is my nomination.

Sidey: I'm going a bit off-piste. My nomination is a real conversation I had with a friend during COVID who went very hard on conspiracy theories. He sent me a ten-hour video and I said I wasn't watching a ten-hour video. Then he sent me something else — some guy doing an impression of Robin Williams on TikTok. And he asked me if it really was an impression. He then sent me a text — and I have it — that read, among other things: "They run the entire continent through the Vatican. The Alliance have been taking them out. When you search the global web for earthquakes and congregate where hundreds have been happening weekly, they're all tracked around ten kilometres deep. Not coincidence. COVID isn't a virus pandemic, it's a bio weapon. But the Alliance hijacked it and have been using the lockdown time where forces are inside keeping safe, to round up all the elites involved. That's why you see so many slips — wearing ankle boots, claiming ankle injury, but really hiding a tag because they are under arrest. Obama, Clinton, Biden, et cetera. Soon humanity won't have a choice but to hear direct from the military, and what will help will be people who seem to have died but actually haven't, coming out to expose things. Biggest thing ever to happen to humanity and we're alive to witness it. Amazing silver lining coming, bro." And I literally did not know what to say.

Reegs: The thing about QAnon though — it turns out there was a global elite of pedophiles doing horrendous things. And you might think that someone making up a QAnon story that sensationalizes Adrenochrome and all that other stuff may have been trying to obscure the fact that there actually was a real pedophile network.

Sidey: A name exists for people who do that because they exist.

Briefly Mentioned — Other Conspiracies

• COINTELPRO (real FBI programme, 1956–71): covert infiltration, blackmail, surveillance of the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and others. Far less aggressively applied to the KKK. Explored in BlacKkKlansman.
• Carlos the Jackal (real person, multiple films including an Eddie Redmayne series). Cris mentions him as his additional nomination.
• Muse: almost their entire discography (The Resistance, The Second Law, Absolution) is steeped in New World Order and Orwellian surveillance themes.
• Chemtrails Over the Country Club — Lana Del Rey.
• From Hell — Jack the Ripper and Freemasons.
• Eyes Wide Shut — Kubrick died just after it was completed; editing was done without him.
• They Live — Rowdy Roddy Piper puts on sunglasses, sees alien overlords among the population.
• The Simpsons — the Stonecutters, plus Bart on Ritalin discovering MLB mass surveillance.
• John Wick — the High Table as a shadowy global criminal elite.
• The Truman Show — also mentioned.
• Da Vinci Code — Dan notes it's "PowerPoint the movie." Sidey still quite likes it.

Main Feature: Sovereign (2025)

Reegs: Had you heard about the Sovereign Citizen movement before this film?

Dan: Not by that name. I knew about people who didn't recognise the law in various ways.

Reegs: It basically doesn't recognize law in any form. They consider themselves exempt from government. There's this concept they call the "straw man" — a corporate entity of the individual who is liable in the eyes of the law, while the real person supposedly is not. It's pseudo-legal mumbo jumbo that paranoid and desperate people employ.

Dan: And it's gaining traction.

Reegs: This film is based on a real incident. And only this week in Australia, a man called Desi Freeman ran for seven months on the run before being shot and killed by police. A similar thing happened in Queensland in 2022. It's a troubling pattern.

Sidey: The Baader-Meinhof gang said in court: we don't recognise this court, we don't recognise your laws.

Dan: The Nazis said something similar at Nuremberg.

Reegs: The film opens with a flash-forward — a desperate call to the emergency services from a member of the public reporting that two police officers have been shot. It sounded like real audio. Then we cut to the Cain household. Joe — played by Jacob Tremblay, who was brilliant in Room — is home alone. About sixteen. He's tidying up the yard, he can't get the lawnmower working, he stacks some metal behind the shed. And he hears a car and his face just lights up. It's his dad.

Dan: And you immediately see they have a good relationship. The dad comes in, makes a fuss of him, checks his homework, asks has he done this, good lad. You think: this isn't an abusive relationship.

Reegs: The eviction notice has arrived. Dad — Nick Offerman — just dismisses it. The bank has no legal authority over him. He's a roofer. There's not much work. His full-time job has become avoiding paying his mortgage and teaching other people to do the same.

Cris: You also see the difference between their house and the neighbour's. Their place hasn't been looked after.

Dan: And Joe occasionally glances at the girl next door who comes back from school with her little sister. You think: how much human contact does this kid actually have?

Reegs: He's been homeschooled since he was ten. He's sixteen now. Six years without a classroom. His dad does try — he sits with him, goes through his work, discusses things philosophically — but it's becoming clear the ideology is seeping into everything.

Dad goes on a kind of internet podcast show about debt elimination. He does seminars across the country, evangelical-style, white suits and red ties, sometimes held in churches. He's preaching to people on disability, people who can't make their mortgage payments, people who feel abandoned by the system. He tells them he can tie the legal system up in knots for a thousand dollars a night.

Dan: And these people with big beards and cowboy hats, they just don't understand how they're being shafted. They're frustrated by something real. And he's very easy to buy into.

Reegs: Joe videos his dad at these events. Watches him with this quiet awe. At this point it all seems odd but almost wholesome.

Dan: But the driving licence moment is where I saw the cracks clearly. He gets pulled over.

Reegs: He's not driving, Dan. He's travelling.

Dan: Right. And the officer asks for licence and registration and he immediately starts telling the police about some ancient law about travellers with horse and carts, and he escalates the situation in about thirty seconds.

Reegs: The first thing he says when asked if this is his car: "No, this isn't a car. It's a vehicle." The officer just stares at him. Dad keeps going. Escalates. Gets arrested. Joe ends up in a detention centre.

Dan: Where he meets Randy Quaid, who gently asks: so there's this fictional legal entity that's responsible for all your problems — why isn't he here, because from where I'm standing, it looks like you are.

Reegs: Meanwhile Joe is in school for the first time in six years. There's a basketball game. He's clapping the other kids when they score. He's smiling. He's thriving. And you just think: of course he is.

Cris: This kid is the opposite of every kid in history. His dad tells him not to go to school and he desperately wants to go.

Dan: He's smart. He's kind. You just want to give him a life.

Reegs: Dad comes out. He's got Martha Plimpton — the girl from the Goonies — with him. One of his seminar devotees who bailed him out. They go to a little Reno type setup and gamble. He's been eighteen years sober, by the way, and here he is drinking and gambling Joe's money. It doesn't go well.

Dan: He comes back with something clearly wrong behind the eyes. At the next seminar his language is much more violent. He's openly talking about not backing down. He takes Joe to a gun shop. They visit a shooting range. He gives Joe a machine gun and says aim for the head — because the chest will have a vest on.

Cris: That's when you realise where this is going.

Reegs: There's a parallel story running alongside all this — Dennis Quaid as the sheriff. His son is a young police cadet just starting out. There's an ongoing argument between them about parenting — the son wants to pick up his crying baby, the sheriff says that softens a child. Hard love. Cold. The opposite of what we initially saw with Joe and his dad, though that's also curdling now.

The bank's deadline arrives. They take the house. And in an astonishing moment, dad hands Joe two guns from the back of the car and tries to simulate a duel with the bailiff. Just firing in the air. He's gone.

Cris: He then tries to represent himself in court, using all the pseudo-legal arguments, and the judge just looks at him and says: right, bailiff, take him out. Case over. And he comes out of the courtroom and tells Joe: we won that. Completely blinkered.

Reegs: Oh — we forgot to mention the most devastating thing. He explains to Joe what pushed him into all of this: his young daughter died of SIDS, and the government insisted on an autopsy he didn't want. And they went ahead anyway. That's where it started. You can see a genuinely grieving man who found something that gave him control.

Dan: And his father before him pushed him away from school too. The pattern goes back.

Reegs: There's another traffic stop. They've got a lot of weapons in the car. It's Dennis Quaid's son and his partner — their first shift. The dad gets out and goes straight into the script. Papers, arguments, traveling not driving. They're just cadets. They call it in.

Dad goes back to the car. Joe can see from the side what's happening. And then Joe grabs the machine gun and opens fire on the police officers.

Dan: Because everything has been drilled into him. He's seen his father in these situations, he's been told violence is the answer, and he acts.

Cris: And he's already agitated. He wanted out. He was starting to see through it.

Reegs: He guns down Dennis Quaid's son and his partner. Then they're off, briefly. They wash the gunpowder residue off in a petrol station. Buy more ammunition. Joe sees the girl from next door and she waves at him. And he can't even wave back. He's gone somewhere he can't come back from.

Dan: And the dad doesn't even try to get Joe out of it. You think he might try and send him somewhere safe. He doesn't.

Reegs: They end up in a car park. Another police car pulls in front of them. Dad starts shooting immediately. It becomes a ten-to-fifteen minute battle scene. Realistic. Eventually the van is Swiss cheese.

Dan: Dennis Quaid hears it on the radio and comes in. He sets the final few shots.

Reegs: And it ends with the funerals. Two Star-Spangled Banner coffins in a church. The girl from next door is in the choir. A small vigil for the two dead father and son. And then it cuts to Quaid, at home, his daughter-in-law at the sink breaking down. And after a while he hears the baby crying. And he goes and picks the baby up. And gives it a little kiss.

Dan: And that's it. A man picking up a crying baby. And it got me.

Reegs: Strong recommend. It made $63,000 at the box office. Almost nobody has seen it. It's bleak, heavy, and quietly devastating. About fathers and sons, gun violence, the American dream as a trap, and what happens when people who feel abandoned by the system find someone telling them it's all a lie.

Dan: Strong recommend.

Cris: Strong recommend. Monotone pacing until the last fifteen minutes — there's not a sunny day in the whole film — but the acting is really strong, especially Jacob Tremblay and Nick Offerman.

Sidey: Strong.