The Stampede

STATE OF PLAY

Media Credit: Sara Travis Brad Eastridge

You always hate to see good money and talent go to waste, especially when your expectations are high. Such is the case with “State of Play,” the new political thriller from director Kevin MacDonald.

In the cinematic drought of the last two months, trailers you would normally shrug at suddenly look enthralling. So discovering the ads for “State of Play” was like spotting the sugar donuts in a long-deserted Chinese buffet.

Judging from the BBC miniseries on which it was based and Russell Crowe and Helen Mirren headlining, I expected at least an intelligent brain tickle. Alas, Crowe and Mirren were the only redeeming features of an otherwise mediocre exercise.

Reporter Cal McCaffrey (Crowe) is a slovenly ace journalist who is becoming eclipsed by the new breed of tech-savvy blog reporters. One of these, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), has just stumbled across a juicy lead on a prominent congressman (Ben Affleck). It seems Congressman Stephen Collins was having an affair with a staffer who was killed, accidentally or not, along with a purse snatcher and a pizza delivery guy in unrelated but interconnected circumstances.

McCaffrey, a close friend of Collins, decides to aid Frye in reporting the story in the hopes of clearing his friend’s name. He soon discovers that the affair was actually part of a vast corporate conspiracy by private security firms to slander Collins, who is heading a congressional investigation on them. And that’s just the first thirty minutes.

It isn’t a weak plot per se, and told well it might make for an interesting thriller, but the script is a lame duck. Whatever originality it may have contained has been squeezed out by the studio sausage grinder. The characters are flat caricatures with no interesting features, and their interaction has all the subtlety of Monty Python’s fish-slapping dance. Sometimes the writers try to inject humor, but it just comes across as an annoying poke at your ribcage to try and make you pay attention.

It was penned by Tony Gilroy (the “Bourne” trilogy, “Michael Clayton”), Billy Ray (standard genre pics like “Breach”) and Matthew Michael Carnahan (political boilers “Lions for Lambs” and “The Kingdom”).

I had no expectations from Billy Ray, and Gilroy has disappointed me two weeks in a row. But Carnahan seems a fairly promising writer, and I admit I was interested mostly because I worked for his director brother Joe at RSA.

I linger on the screenplay because it’s the weak foundation of the piece. Never in my life will I understand producing a lame script. But my theory is that screenwriters who have one, if only one, good idea get their break and end up with a hit.

They may be average writers at best, and it may only be their concept that remained from their first script. But now they have a career of mediocre—not bad, just not great—screenplays that get bought because of the credibility of their first success.

Of course, decent films can still be made from shaky scripts (i.e. Ridley Scott’s “Black Rain”). But under the direction of Kevin MacDonald, the film becomes cumbersome and plodding.

MacDonald has an Oscar-winning history in documentaries and only recently expanded into features with “The Last King of Scotland.” But even his shaky-cam couldn’t squeeze any drama out of the piece. He instead just shoots line for line what the script says, and it felt like he didn’t care any more about the film than I did.

The rest of the cast made Crowe’s and Mirren’s incredible talents stand out even more. McAdams’ spunky cub reporter was just annoying while I could have made pop-up videos of Affleck’s acting style. (I’ll turn my eyes here and furrow my brow, so they’ll know I’m sad.) Jeff Daniels, Robin Wright Penn and Jason Bateman all try to stay interested in bewilderingly miscast roles.

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