(Note: Contradicting the very first line of this review, what’s wrong here is that Hollywood launders stories like this, voiding them of meaning, processing them into myth, flattening affect.)

While there’s nothing terribly wrong with Kill the Messenger, there’s still something not right about it. It does manage to honour its subject, Gary Webb. Played here as a likable but driven scruff by Jeremy Renner, Webb was the investigative journalist whose multipart series “Dark Alliance” connected the dots between the CIA-backed Contra war in Nicaragua and the crack epidemic in the States—an extremely dirty business given the tacit sanction of the U.S. government. Kill the Messenger doesn’t whitewash the response from the Agency, seen here threatening Webb’s family right to his face.

The CIA also smeared the reporter through its assets at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and especially the Los Angeles Times, all of them conveniently pissed, in the film’s view, at being scooped by the podunk San Jose Mercury News. Webb’s jumpy editors (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Oliver Platt, the latter being particularly good) threw him under the bus, his career and life were ruined, and he eventually put a gun in his mouth. With several episodes of Homeland under his belt, director Michael Cuesta knows how to craft a lean and efficient thriller with an effectively paranoid edge—so what’s the problem here? Gary Webb isn’t a threat to anyone these days, least of all the CIA, whose historic drug-running activities are met with such widespread indifference that they’re mined for yuks in the newest series of Archer. Too little, too late, in other words.

The movie also does precisely what Webb is warned about by a Beltway operative (Michael Sheen) burned by his proximity to the scandal. “They’ll turn you into the story,” he cautions. He also remarks, “Some truths are too big to tell.” Given that he was responsible for last year’s insulting JFK flick, Parkland—a film based entirely on the moth-eaten Warren Commission cover-up—it’s a premise that screenwriter Peter Landesman has evidently taken to heart. It compromises Kill the Messenger’s credibility, to say the least.

Georgia Straight, October 2014