Kill the Messenger ***½ (2014, Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Lucas Hedges) – Movie Review

Jeremy Renner is excellent in an intense, low-key performance as the real-life Gary Webb, a San Jose Mercury News journalist reporter who in 1996 exposes the CIA’s role in importing cocaine into California to raise funds to arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But the whistle blower pays dearly for his honesty and integrity and truth telling.

At first Webb is the blue-eyed boy with the scoop of the decade, but then he becomes the target of the CIA’s vicious smear campaign that drives him to despair and his marriage onto the rocks. We see the other media turning on the little guy, with the Washington Post attacking the journalist rather than further investigate the story.

Renner is neat and compact, a very efficient, committed performer, all the more effective because he’s not at all movie starry. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is good too as his editor Anna Simons, and also very watchable are Rosemarie DeWitt as his troubled wife Sue, Lucas Hedges as his uncomprehending son Ian, Oliver Platt as the greasy newspaper boss Jerry Ceppos, Barry Pepper, Tim Blake Nelson, Andy Garcia as jailed Norwin Meneses and Ray Liotta as John Cullen.

Based on Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series of articles and Nick Schou’s book Kill the Messenger, Peter Landesman’s screenplay is crisp, credible and informative, with plenty of smart and intelligent entertainment value. Michael Cuesta’s direction is plain, straightforward, clear and fast moving. It’s a very good, very honourable, very interesting movie that just misses being great and an award-winner.

That’s perhaps because it gets a bit soapy and sentimental in that down-home American way towards the end just when it needs to get tougher and more rigorous still, and slightly fizzles out at the end, using title cards to explain the conclusion to the story when a couple more big dramatic scenes telling the story would help a lot. Otherwise, it’s very nearly in the All the President’s Men class.

Renner did this instead of playing political whistle-blower Julian Assange in 2013’s The Fifth Estate.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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