Doc Watch: Guns and Religion

3-1/2 BULLETS, 10 MINUTES (B) - This somber retelling of the stand-your-ground shooting of a black teen in a gas station parking lot in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2012 plays like a really solid episode of NBC's "Dateline."

Writer/director Marc Silver ("Who Is Dayani Cristal?") takes a workmanlike approach to following the aftermath of the shooting by a white man of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, who had reacted angrily to a demand to turn down the "thug music" playing in his parked car. It helps to enjoy the narrative if you don't look the story up or refresh your memory about the resulting trial of Michael Dunn in early 2014.

Silver alternates between extended quiet scenes with Jordan's grieving parents (who separated when he was a child) and testimony at the televised trial. It's essentially a legal procedural with a touch of back story. The emotional duress of the parents gets tiring, but the legal maneuvering builds to a satisfying conclusion.

Silver overlays a phony sense of foreboding throughout, with ominous shots of Jacksonville set to a jazzy "Naked City" score. It doesn't quite work in the Sunshine State. He also drops in snippets of talk-radio debate, which provides pedestrian analysis of this shooting as well as a previous media sensation, the gunning down of Trayvon Martin. Little insight comes through. All it does is pad this out to 98 minutes, when the story could have been told in closer to an hour.

If you don't know how the trial turns out, you might find this moving and compelling.

PROPHET'S PREY (B-minus) - There's a nice, tight documentary somewhere in this mess. Amy Berg ("West of Memphis," "Janis: Little Girl Blue") digs into the skeevy story of Warren Jeffs, the disgraced spiritual leader of the fundamentalist Mormon church (FLDS).

Berg riffs on the work of two authors: Jon Krakauer (best known for "Into the Wild") and Sam Brower, author of the 2011 book that lends the movie its name. Brower comes off as a dogged watchdog journalist who wouldn't rest until Jeffs was exposed as a fraud and a pedophile.

We also hear form those close to the FLDS, which broke off from the mainstream church and, seeking to continue the practice of polygamy, settled in southern Utah. Warren Jeffs took over from his father and bloomed into a frightening cult leader, preying on dozens of women he took as wives, many of them underage. Family infighting causes a rift. The case against him slowly builds, and his scheme gradually unravels, eventually sending him on the run as a fugitive on the FBI's Most Wanted list.

This should be riveting cinema. It's not. Nick Cave music sets an ominous mood, and Berg wisely drops in excerpts from Jeffs' sonorous sermons. But there's little intrigue. One of his victims sits for an interview and, not surprisingly, offers little insight, as if she had yet to be deprogrammed. Talking heads seems to be scrambled into the mix haphazardly, with variations in video and sound quality. The film drags and sags during its 101-minute run (longer than advertised at Sundance and on IMDb).

It's a one-note tune, and there's no suspense in the build to the climax. This could have been a great story, but instead, it's just an average, if interesting, documentary.