An average movie

I had this movie for a couple of years in my queue so I wanted to check it out at some point, especially since it was directed by Rob Reiner. Reiner tragically died only a few months ago (and was probably killed by his own son making the whole affair even sadder than it already was) so it was good to pay tribute to his work. The fact that Reiner actually played one of the main characters for once (I can’t remember the last time he did that for one of his movies) was another bittersweet circumstance (it seems that he had to replace Alec Baldwin at the last minute). Anyway, how was the damned thing after all? Well, since it didn’t get much love when it was released, I wasn’t expecting much but I was surprised how strong the material was after all. Seriously, it was some fascinating stuff. Unfortunately, with all respect to the late Reiner, I’m afraid the movie itself was so flat as a pancake after all. Of course, they tried to go for a modern version of ‘All the President's Men’ focusing on the propaganda around the war in Iraq back in the 2000’s. Well, if you would compare the two movies, you will see that it is not so easy after all to make a movie about 2 journalists spending most of their time on the phone investigating some huge governmental conspiracy. One issue with Reiner’s movie is that, with 90 mins, it was just way too short to deal properly with all the characters involved and, above all, to properly display what happened at the time. Obviously, the focus should have been on Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel and their journalistic work but they added some other characters but most of them didn’t work. This young black man (I can’t even remember his name which shows how much impact he made) and his tragic fate didn’t work at all, even though the biggest victims were indeed the poor soldiers who were sent to die in Iraq for some bogus reasons. Even more pathetic was Jessica Biel who had such a useless and thankless role playing the neighbor/lover of one of the two main journalists. Anyway, to conclude, even though it was another half-baked flick, it does show once again that Rob Reiner had his heart on the right place and, in spite of its flaws, it is actually a really important story so I think it is worth a look. 

6/10