Resembling less and less of his previous shape-shifting style these days, Morris’s ‘Mr. Death’ is more a continuation of his last film ‘Fast, Cheap & Out of Control’ than a one-of-a-kind masterwork to match his films of the past wrought with : randomness (‘Gates of Heaven’), social impact / entertainment (‘The Thin Blue Line’) or comprehensive biography / adaptation of philosophical ramblings (‘A Brief History of Time’). This is not to say ‘Mr. Death’ is a bad film - it’s not. But the key flaw in both ‘Fast, Cheap & Out of Control’ and ‘Mr. Death’ is that after awhile, Morris stops controlling what’s going on and simply lets the subject(s) sculpt the film - with dry results.

 This is not to say that I didn’t heavily admire the way in which the film was arranged - it sticks right to it’s title. It begins with engineer Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.’s rise - where we observe him substituting the moral crisis the majority of us would face in creating and maintaining execution equipment with a humanitarian jolt. Leuchter wants prisoners to die instantly. Apparently, many have been suffering. This is where we first greet the film’s center, the great question of qualification. Does being able to create or repair an electric chair make Leuchter capable to create or maintain a machine of lethal injection? Gallows? Gas Chambers? Leuchter, of course, ponders these things into the camera. Morris is setting up a larger point at hand.

 The next bit of the movie deals with Leuchter’s assistance of a court case in Canada where a man has been charged with printing a pamphlet denying the Holocaust. Leuchter, well paid, heads off to Poland to take samples from gas chambers, including the ones at Auschwitz. The samples come back negative, though refutable, for gas. Leuchter, in one week, decides that there were never any gas chambers in the Holocaust. And thus begins the fall of his odd, but prestigious (on the prison circuit) reputation.

 He was chosen to go to Poland and appear in court because of his career in America. The film addresses this huge detail in the proper manner - is Leuchter in any way more adequate to decide whether or not gas chambers existed in the Holocaust than any other engineer? Does his understanding of current trends in capital punishment make him some sort of historian that can make a judgement call based on one type of evidence?

 Leuchter is an interesting fellow. He drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes (40 cups and six packs a day, respectively). He has a sense of humor (wonderful old photos of him strapped to an electric chair on his lawn). He has an indispensable New England accent. His teeth are the color of a banana. He speaks eloquently, but in distinctly discernable English - not in engineer jargon. As usual, Morris has chosen a near-perfect subject for a ninety minute documentary. If only he would take more liberties and go back to his experimental roots examining these fascinating and bizarre entities underneath a magnifying glass, with complete control and a wicked self-gratifying agenda in mind. Though it’s not a great statement to say that ‘Mr. Death’ is merely installment #5 of Morris’s ‘Fast, Cheap & Out of Control’ - Leuchter would certainly be the most compelling of Morris’s subjects.