State of Play

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Apr 222009
 

SOPI’m always up for some political thriller business.  And based off the trailers and TV spots for State of Play, that’s exactly what I was going to get when I walked into the theater.  And for the most part, it delivered.  But in the end, I felt the film may be playing up a tired premise and relying on recycled plot twists a little too much for me to recommend this film.

State of Play is based off a 6 episode BBC mini-series that I have not seen (no, I’m not that worldly, I can access Wikipedia just like you).  The plot involves a young “hot-shot” senator (Ben Affleck) who reveals he had an affair with one of his staff whom just so happened to jump in front of the subway train this morning.  Grizzled reporter Cal McAffey (Russell Crowe) manages to not punch any one in the face as he sets out to single handedly save his failing employer with this whopper of a story.  It also helps that he went to school with the senator in question and has blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) to assist in his investigation.

The strongest aspect was the cast.¬† Although for about the first 30 minutes, I felt like it was just raining stars on the film set (Crowe, McAdams, Affleck, some hot red head, chick from Breaking Upwards, Helen Mirren, Jeff Daniels, fat dude from Billy Madison…¬† I could go on).¬† The biggest surprise for me was Affleck, whose Congressman Stephen Collins very effectively drew me into the picture.¬† I couldn‚Äôt help but root for the guy.¬† Mirren plays Cal‚Äôs trash talking boss and she was good for a few laughs.¬† And of course Jeff Daniels is always welcome.

Unfortunately, that’s about as much as I can fellate this film.  Spoiler time.  You know the drill.

Now I expect plot twists going into a movie like this.  But fuck me if this movie didn’t have like 1 plot twist per minute in the last half of its running time.  Most of them I was perfectly fine with.  But the last one just seemed a little too much for my taste (SUPER DUPER SPOILER).  They spent so much time convincing me the senator was a good guy that when I learned he was a murdering piece of shit I felt like I was cheated for the entire film.

To continue this spoilerific rant, let me get this straight- the point of the film is that an evil mercenary corporation and the government are both conspiring to manipulate the news so that they both come out looking squeaky clean?  But they’re not colluding with each other, they simply happen to be duping the gullible news paper industry at the same time with the same fucking story?  And the movie takes its time to mention that a new, seemingly evil, corporation has taken over the newspaper that Cal works for and they are not one of the “bad” corporations?  I might be nitpicking, but hopefully Webster’s can use this paragraph as an example of “convoluted.”

(END SUPER DUPER SPOILER)

So I guess if you don’t try and dissect the film as I clearly have here, you should have a good time.  There are some very tense moments and the acting is great, but it just fell short of being a big recommend from me.  If I had to rate it, I would say it was an average attempt at revisiting the political thriller.  The good news is that if you accidentally read through my spoilers, there’s still plenty of plot twists that I didn’t reveal waiting for you.

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