Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Did the CIA Ruin This Movie Review"]The first half of Kill the Messenger is wonderful. Jeremy Renner plays Gary Webb, the small time San Jose journalist who in 1996 blew the lid off the CIA's complicity in America's crack epidemic. According to the film, the CIA allowed Nicaraguan kingpins to smuggle Robert Downey Jr. quantities of cocaine into the US, in exchange for financing a guerilla war against the democratically elected communists running their own country. Watching Renner chase down the conspiracy is the kind of thrilling investigative procedural that never fails to hold my attention. It doesn't last. Unlike the Irish thriller I watched last week, Hidden Agenda (1990), which pursued its own OSTENSIBLY fictional (but only because the filmmakers couldn't prove it) conspiracy all the way to the highest levels of MI6, Kill the Messenger runs into a brick wall about halfway through. That's when Renner publishes his story, bringing down the wrath of every major news organization he scooped, and spends the rest of the movie literally beating his fists against the aforementioned brick wall as a jealous press turns his life to shambles. The movie ends in a hotel ballroom with Renner, fists all bandaged up from frustratedly punching his own car like he thinks it's Street Fighter, giving a big speech in front of the world's journalists or maybe just San Jose's journalists in which he excorciates them for being more interested in poking holes in his story than following up on it, and starts to cry when he reminds them why he got into this business in the first place (<i>to tell the truth</i>). He then steps onto an escalator and ascends heavenwards, where a title card informs us he eventually took his own life. Or did he dun dun dun? Backing up a bit, there's a scene before that where a retired CIA dirty tricks man (played by silver fox Ray Liotta) appears in Renner's room in the middle of the night, confirms everything, but refuses to go on record or provide any reason to believe he wasn't an utter fabrication. I have no problem with the film including a scene like this - the true story of the CIA poisoning poor people at home to buy guns to shoot poor people abroad is muddy and poorly sourced, but above all still probably true, so it's reassuring to know that at least the movie believes it. I just wish they would've respected their audience enough to delve a little further into the language of cinema. Show Liotta take Renner by the hand and fly out of his bedroom window like Peter Pan, wind caressing their faces - oh, the pure joy of flight! - only to gaze down from beneath a green screened starry night at all the heinous crimes the CIA is perpetrating right now around the world, while every other reporter is at home in stocking cap, sound asleep. It would've been a bold if fantastically unwise choice, the kind I think the real Gary Webb would've appreciated.[/quote]