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USA 2009
Directed by
Kevin Macdonald
117 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

State Of Play

State of Play is a slick mainstream political thriller in the style of The Manchurian Candidate (the 2004 version) that  borrows heavily from the real life Watergate exposé depicted in All The President’s Men (1976) . It doesn’t entirely work but the combination of a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray that is challengingly convoluted, Kevin MacDonald’s stylishly on-point directing and a marquee cast make it a solid if typologically familiar diversion.

Russell Crowe plays Cal McAffrey, a classic let-nothing (and that includes any life or concern for personal grooming)-get-in-the-way-of-the-story investigative reporter for "The Washington Globe" (as opposed to ATPM’s Washington Post). The story is a scandal involving an ambitious Congressman, Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) who has been revealed to have been cheating on his wife (Robin Wright Penn) after his mistress is killed in a train accident. McAffrey ,who just happens to have been Collins’ dorm-mate in college, discovers a link between Collins’s mistress and a couple of drug-related killings and starts to follow the trail, aided by a plucky junior colleague (Rachel McAdams), one that leads, of course,  to corporate skulduggery and political and personal lies.

Crowe who replaced Brad Pitt after he is in his element as the latter dropped out is in his element as a practitioner of old school, end-justifies-the-mean s investigative journalism although McAdams seems a tad too old to play his feisty colleague, a new-gen online blogger. If McAdams has little contribute beyond filling her allotted function in the narrative as has Wright Penn as the wife,  Helen Mirren is a treat as the kick-ass editor-in-chief who is trying to juggle the demands of the newspaper’s new corporate owners.  Affleck is devilishly handsome but that’s about it whilst Jeff Daniels is good as a Republican party  power-broker and Jason Bateman has a small turn as a grug-fuelled PR agent .

Like most thrillers, State of Play depends on a more-or-less likely series of coincidences and contrivances but the film moves at such a clip that one extends forbearance although for my money the whole last act with yet another twist in the tale could have been jettisoned (presumably this would have looked less excessive in its original setting of a six-hour BBC miniseries).

There’s nothing new in State of Play but if you’re in the mood for a couple of hours of well-crafted escapism it’s an acceptable choice.

 

 

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